


Smoke and Mirrors

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bisexual Character, Bisexual Remus Lupin, Biting, Butch Nymphadora Tonks, Dirty Talk, EWE, Except PIV, F/F, F/M, Femslash, Frottage, Grinding, Kid Fic, LGBTQ Themes, Light BDSM, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Masturbation, Nonbinary Character, Nymphadora Tonks Lives, Oral Sex, Pack Dynamics, Pegging, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Queer Character, Queer Ginny Weasley, Queer Het, Queer Nymphadora Tonks, Really All the Sex, Remus Lupin Lives, Slash, Switching, Vaginal Fingering, Veritaserum, dildoes, metamours, offscreen MCD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-04 10:27:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10989051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: It started as a casual thing. Tonks was queer, after all, and Remus was with Sirius. So how did they wind up married and stuck in a manky flat in Whitechapel--with a screaming baby, no money, no work, and too many memories of how things used to be? Fortunately, Ginny arrives to shake things up. Truths get told. Identities recalibrated. ‘Cos if you try sometimes, you get what you need.





	1. Moonlight Becomes You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peccadilloes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peccadilloes/gifts).



> Be advised: Everyone portrayed is above the age of consent in Britain, but an eight-year age disparity exists between Ginny and Tonks.
> 
> Huge thanks are due: To lefthandofglory, for her fearless concrit, encouragement, dramaturgy, and steadfast enthusiasm over countless emails. To peccadilloes, for asking for this fic in the first place; for the camaraderie, keen observation, fashion advice, and table pounding while it was being written; and most of all, for understanding why. And to iamisaac, for the eagle-eyed copy editing and sage advice on everything from British diction to finer points of canon to avian life in London. I’m so grateful to all three of you. Any remaining mistakes are mine.

She isn’t dead.

But she’s burning up, she can’t breathe. Smoke everywhere, she can’t see, and someone is screaming.

She’s awake.

Tonks pushes the pillow off her head, kicks her legs free of the bedclothes. A flood of adrenalin is all that’s left of the nightmare, and yet the screaming continues, and the howling, wild and animal. And now someone’s pounding on the bedroom door, someone is trying to break down the door, and she is awake, but—

_Teddy._

Her breasts rock-hard inside her tee shirt, Tonks gropes in the darkness for her wand as another heavy thud shakes the door. How long has she been asleep? Is Teddy still in the playpen in the sitting room? She casts on the light and stumbles out of bed, staggers to the bedroom door and turns the knob.

Wolf-Remus falls in, his front legs giving out from under him. Swaying drunkenly, he raises his head and tries to get to his feet again, his yellow eyes glazed with wolfsbane and sorrow. If Teddy’s shrieks have roused him from the potion’s induced sleep, Teddy must have been screaming for a long time, which means he will be inconsolable for hours. How many hours has he been in his playpen, all alone save for a drugged wolf?

“I’m sorry, Remus,” Tonks says, hearing the near-tears of exhaustion in her voice. She reaches down to touch the thick silver pelt. “I forgot to put a time limit on the spell. I’m so sorry.” The wolf tries to lick her hand, but she is already through the door. “Sleep on the bed,” she calls over her shoulder, though she knows he will not.

Her breasts burning, she hurries down the unlit hallway to the front room. She should never have cast a deafness charm on herself, no matter what Remus said. What if there’d been a fire? And she should not have forgotten the time limit. She’d only meant to nap for an hour before moonrise, not be out cold for however many hours it’s been. How long was Remus out there, throwing himself against the door while their son cried? She should not be so exhausted, so utterly knackered that she can barely cast any kind of spell at all, let alone an Inauridus. But her spell work is so bad that the Ministry has placed her on leave without pay--when she tried to return to work last month, on her first day back she nearly killed a Muggle when her Memory modification charm went awry.

She simply needs to sleep. She needs Teddy to sleep. That’s all. That’s fucking all. 

She finds Teddy wedged up against the mesh side of the playpen, sticky with snot and weeping, his dear face gone red with rage. She hopes it is rage only, and not terror at having been left alone. Teddy shrieks louder when he sees her, stretching out his arms to be picked up. Tonks lifts his small, surprisingly heavy body to her own and feels him slacken in momentary relief against her; then he stiffens in her arms and begins wailing again.

She knows from experience that he will be too overwrought to nurse for at least an hour, too worked up to do anything but scream as she walks him up and down their tiny sitting room, then up and down their narrow hallway, milk running down her tee shirt, tears running down her face. Up and down and up and down and up and down their tiny narrow life.

It was not always like this.

There was a time when they were happy, Tonks and Remus. Weren’t they? Happy together. Think all the way back to the beginning, at Grimmauld Place. Back to when Sirius was still alive.

She might never have noticed Remus at all—not as a person in his own right, someone who existed apart from being her cousin’s boyfriend—had Remus not been there the night things ended with Fleur.

The certainty that war was coming had so permeated their lives that it was easy to ascribe all manner of ills to its approach. Chatting in the shops, or making small talk at work with sympathetic others, it was not uncommon to hear people blame problems as diverse as fog in September, or a fight with a spouse, or even a bottle of spoiled milk, on the Death Eaters’ growing power. Tonks told herself a version of this about Fleur as well—that things could be different with Fleur if not for the anxiety that attended all of them constantly. Who would go missing next? Who would come home to find the Dark Mark hanging in the sky above their roof? Fleur would have her only at a moment’s notice, and never for very long. Being with Fleur for those stolen trysts was like having one sip of very fine cognac, or eating one perfect chocolate truffle. Not enough, but she could savor the memory for days. Fleur liked to meet in secret places, wrong places, places where they might get caught. Places, Tonks realized in retrospect, where Fleur always had an excuse to leave in a rush.

_What eef someone sees us here?_

At the back of the Leaky, hands moving under the tablecloth. Or in a lift at the Ministry. The risk of it somehow a counterbalance to all the risks everyone was taking simply to get through the day. Grinding into Fleur’s elegant thigh, gripping her fair shoulders, Tonks could forget about whatever she’d had to encounter on that day’s Auror mission, assignments that grew increasingly grim and bloody with each passing week. Fleur—fragile-bodied Fleur, so willowy and blonde and breakable compared to Tonks’s dykey sturdiness—would slide one finger into Tonks’s pants, right down inside her Y fronts. Find the purse of her cunt, still closed, and stroke until she found its clasp and snapped it open, slipping in her finger in. And then Tonks would dissolve. Fall apart as Fleur fucked her, thumb sweeping over her clit. Fleur flipping her so hard, every single time.

They were in the ladies’ loo at Wands Out the night it ended, in that weird, carpeted powder-room alcove of the ladies’ loo, whose door closed but did not lock. Tonks was backed up against that door, panting, her jeans yanked down to her thighs. Fleur was pressing against her, fingers deep inside her, pouring Fleur-kisses into her mouth like fine brandy, each one heady with the vapor of distilled perfection. 

And then: 

_I have to go,_ Fleur said. Drawing her hand away as if she’d been stung.

And when Tonks had protested:

 _I am sorry. I cannot be late._

_But you’re—I haven’t even—Fleur, why?_

_You know what I told you. Beell will be home in a few minutes. I want to be there when he gets back. I spend my evenings with heeem._

That last pronoun drawn out like a knife from a sheath.

She realized only later that Fleur had done it on purpose: dropped her so hard there would be no way they might continue. But at the time she couldn’t understand it. Furious and hurting, her body still buzzing with the frustration of almost-orgasm, Tonks had slammed out of the ladies’ room and into the gents’ and morphed into her bloke body. Fleur never wanted Tonks to be a bloke around her, and certainly never let Tonks touch her as a bloke. _That is something only Beell does._ Crying tears of humiliation and rage, Tonks had tossed off in the stall. Then, still morphed as a bloke, she’d gone back out to the main room of the pub, slammed that bony boy arse down on the barstool on the end and ordered a shot of Muggle whisky and a pint. 

Still flushed from Fleur, pheromones flaring Fleur. Fucking Fleur. Fleur fucking her over. She drank the whisky in one gulp and downed the bitter too quickly as well. Knocked over the not-quite-empty pint glass while signaling for another, and then became aware of someone watching. Looked around and there was Remus Lupin, leaning against the wall at the edge of the bar, almost close enough to bang elbows with.

“Hullo,” Tonks said miserably, mopping up the spilled bitter with a serviette. “Buy you a whisky or a pint?”

Remus looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t—er, no thank you.”

He seemed embarrassed; Tonks did not know why.

“I didn’t mean to stare,” Remus added. “I’m not—looking for company. It was just—you look very much like a friend of mine.”

Despite everything, Tonks burst out laughing. Of course he hadn’t recognized her in this body.

“Lupin, it’s me, Tonks.”

And then Remus did two things she’d never seen him do before. First, though it was only for a fraction of a moment, his face betrayed complete astonishment. And second, he laughed. Deep and full and open, so that while it lasted, he seemed an entirely different man.

 _So that is what Sirius sees,_ Tonks thought.

“Good Lord,” Remus said, recovering his hold on himself. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you, you understand, but at myself; I didn’t know you could—I mean, of course I knew, but—Merlin, you look so much like Sirius. And Regulus. Which isn’t funny in the least.”

“I’m a Black too,” Tonks reminded him. “I just don’t have the last name.”

“Yes. Of course. I—well.” Remus sat down beside her, smiling his usual smile again, the one Tonks was never sure how to read. “Well. Yes, thank you: you _could_ buy me a whisky.”

Emboldened by alcohol, Tonks had told him about Fleur, and he’d listened sympathetically. Said something about unavailable people and something about the war. Apologized again for not having recognized her.

“There’s no reason you would have,” Tonks said. “I never do this body in public. Or much in private, for that matter.”

“Why not?” 

“Habit left over from being a kid, I guess. Andromeda used to get very upset. People do, you know. They like when I do the pig noses and such, but turning all the way into a bloke”—Tonks swept a hand down her currently flat chest, down over the crotch of her denims, down to her boots, which were a bit tight now on her bloke feet—“it unsettles people.” 

Fleur, for example. 

“Sirius has never seen you like this, then?” Remus asked.

“I don’t suppose he has.”

Remus was fiddling with his serviette, folding and unfolding it between his long fingers.

“Would it cheer you up,” he said carefully, “to come back to Grimmauld Place with me, perhaps? Sirius is there, of course, and—he doesn’t get to see many new faces these days. He won’t be unsettled, I promise, and it would certainly cheer him to see you—er, like this.”

“You love him very much,” Tonks blurted out. But Remus did not seem taken aback.

“Oh, yes,” he said. And then added, “It’s the least I can do.” 

They walked a while—Tonks’s suggestion, despite the tight boots—before Apparating. It was an oddly clear night for London, and the moon hung huge and heavy in the sky. By the time they’d gone five blocks, Remus’s face was creased with strain. 

“Full moon’s not for two more nights,” he said, though Tonks hadn’t asked aloud. “But the pain starts now. Wolfsbane works by diluting the effects of transformation—it spreads them out over time. So the full moon’s much easier, but the days leading up to it—I hurt.” He shook his shoulders out vigorously. “But I’m fine now,” he added. “It’s a pain that comes and goes.”

“Wotcher, cousin,” Tonks said when they’d Apparated into the basement kitchen.

Sirius hesitated only a moment before twigging who it was. He kissed Tonks on the cheek, and then pulled both of them into a hug.

“You’re quicker than I was,” Remus admitted.

“Very handsome,” Sirius said appreciatively, stepping back to survey Tonks-as-bloke more closely. “And just my height, too.’

“A metamorphmagus can’t change mass,” Tonks said. “So without the tits and hips, I’m taller.” 

Sirius turned to Remus. “Quite fit, wouldn’t you say, Moony?”

“Don’t be such a bloody narcissist,” Remus said. “You know perfectly well he looks just like you.”

They sat around the table in the basement kitchen, drinking and smoking. Remus summoned his turntable from upstairs and they played old Muggle records. Then Sirius, laughing and half drunk, conjured a spinning ball of mirrors to hang from the ceiling of that dark and narrow kitchen, transforming the room into chips of rainbow light skittering off the surfaces of the enormous copper pans, the silver tea service.

“It’s almost like I’m out in public again,” he said, more happy than bitter. 

They’d danced, Tonks alone and Sirius and Remus pressed against each other, hips thrusting in time to the music, fast and close as if they were on the dance floor at Wands Out on a Friday night. Where Sirius could never go. Dancing in this body, the bloke body Fleur hadn’t ever wanted, her heart felt farther away from Fleur and not so bruised.

Then a slower song. Sirius loosened his grip on Remus and reached out to pull Tonks close beside them. Three men slow-dancing together, then, hands on one another’s shoulders. Remus leaned over to kiss Sirius, Tonks right there beside them, and was that an invitation, then? Did they want what she suddenly found herself wanting? When they broke apart, she slid her bloke body in between them, danced back against Sirius. She could feel Remus’s magic reaching forward. Reaching for Sirius through her, but reaching for her as well, and her own magic was reaching back, the particular flavor it had when she was a bloke—leaner and quieter; more slaty-feeling, not so much sun in it—but still hers. Tonks-the-bloke leaned in toward Remus, toward the heat that emanated from him like a jar of Bluebell Flames. She was nearly pressed against him, and now the Bluebell Flames were flaring inside her too: their thighs were touching and she was getting hard. She shifted her weight forward until her cock was against his thigh. Sirius was at her back, pressing up against her, the music connecting their three bodies, its rhythm a single heartbeat shared by all three of them. Then Remus gasped and broke away from them both, doubling over in pain.

Tonks caught him around the waist while Sirius got him by the shoulders. They half-dragged him to a kitchen chair, where Remus sat down hard, his face pale, his breathing shallow.

Was he going into shock?

Sirius shook his head. “He’ll be all right in a minute,” he said, attentive but not worried. Tonks pulled up a chair beside. She wanted to do something for him, but Sirius held up his hand, signaling that she should wait. Then that hand came to rest on the inside of Tonks’s skinny bloke thigh. Was it a restraint, or a promise?

Remus’s eyes were closed, his face working a mixture of pain and concentration. After a minute, he took a long breath, ran a hand down his cheek and looked at them.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His expression was still taut, but he was back in control. “That bit never gets easier.”

Sirius leaned forward and kissed his temple, then ran his tongue the length of Remus’s forehead. A man being a dog. A lover being a flannel, wiping away the sheen of pain.

“You know I love both your forms,” Sirius told him, and the words, not meant for Tonks, knifed into her and bloomed longing like a wound, flowed through her quicker than intention, so that she felt her body shift before she intended it to, her bloke self breaking like a wave and then retreating, reforming. Washing her up female again, which was odd—she never shifted by mistake, not unless she was drunk or overcome with emotion. And she wasn’t either one.

“Merlin’s tits,” Sirius said, and took his hand off her suddenly-female thigh as if he’d been burned.

Tonks sat back. Twice in one night, then, she’d been picked up only to be set down again. Like some fucking cup of tea a person decided they didn’t want after all.

“Don’t make that face,” Remus said, looking at Sirius. 

“What face?” Sirius was still scowling.

“Your ‘someone’s eaten my pudding’ face.”

“I’m not making _that_ face—” Sirius reached for the firewhisky and took a swallow. “But it’s a bit disconcerting, isn’t it, when a bloke turns into a girl just as you’re feeling him up?”

“Says the man who spends half his life as a dog,” Remus countered.

Tonks gave Sirius a light shove. “It’s still me in there, you prat,” she said, hoping the sadness she felt was masked by clownish irritation. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted Sirius. It was the other thing.

“Well, it gave me a turn, that’s all,” Sirius said. “I don’t pull birds.”

“Clearly not,” she said, trying for a light tone, “or you’d know what you’re missing.”

Remus reached for Sirius’s whisky glass and took a small sip. “Don’t take it personally, Tonks,” he said. “Sirius doesn’t pull _blokes_ these days, either.”

Sirius’s head shot up. 

“Fuck off, Moony.”

“I didn’t mean _me_ ,” Remus said. “Obviously, when just this mo—”

“I know what you meant,” Sirius growled, his voice low and dangerous, “and you can fuck off about it.”

Remus opened his mouth, closed it again. Then he turned to Tonks.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is my fault. Things get a little tense right before full.”

Before Tonks could answer, Sirius’s body in the chair beside her shimmered, then darkened and seemed to fold in on itself like a blanket. A black blanket that shook itself out as the dog dropped to the floor, plowing his shaggy head into Tonks’s wide female thighs.

She sat still, startled, as Padfoot nuzzled her knee and looked up at her, his dog eyes dark and mournful.

“That’s an apology as well,” Remus said. “Sirius has always been easier to forgive when he’s in dog form.” His mouth smiled in a way that didn’t quite reach his eyes, but his long fingers dropped to Padfoot’s head and began stroking the soft black fur. Even as a dog, Sirius was beautiful, Tonks noted.

“Pads,” Remus said, taking one silky ear between his long fingers. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a friend, a friend who—” he hesitated, searching for the words he wanted. “Who changes,” he finished. “We should both try to behave.”

Padfoot gave a whimper and licked Tonks’s fingers. Tonks sighed, and reached out to pat his head as well. She and Remus sat like that a while, on either side of the dog, caressing him. Then Remus gave another sharp gasp, clutching his shoulder as the pain flared again.

“I should go to bed,” he said a moment later, when he could speak. He stretched his long legs and got to his feet. “It’ll get worse soon, but it won’t last.” He held out his hand and she took it. Something stiller, more intimate than a handshake, but closed like a handshake, closing the door on the evening. “Thank you for coming over, Tonks,” he said. “I’m sorry we’re not better hosts. It seems we’re sorely out of practice.”

“It was nice.” She felt shy, all of a sudden. “Nice for me.”

“Perhaps you’ll come back and see us, then. Not for Order business. For a visit. In whatever body you like.”

“Of course.” She gave his hand a squeeze, then dropped it.

And then Padfoot was rippling again, shifting back, and Sirius stood before her, his pale tattooed hands gripping her biceps. “Cousin,” he said, and bent his head to kiss her on both cheeks.

She kissed the air beside his head, then slapped him lightly on the arse before sweeping her wand and Apparating home.

She woke the next morning in her male body again. Dark hair like Sirius’s on the backs of her forearms, her bloke hand cradling a hard-on. Last night came rushing back around her— she and Remus stroking Sirius’s dog head, their fingers colliding again and again in the silky hair. Remus’s forehead against Sirius’s, Remus’s hands—those long fingers cupping Sirius’s arse. Oh yes. She felt that right in her cock. And then Sirius and Remus kissing over Tonks’s bloke shoulders, and the heat of Remus’s body against hers, and her cock, this cock, hard against his thigh. Oh yes, it was good to toss off to that, Remus against her like that, before the pain came for him again and Sirius got narked off and the evening went to hell.

The fantasy going to hell now too, the old thought entering, distracting: _Does my body morph back and forth while I sleep?_

And then a new thought: Would it, could it, ever be possible to go to them, to Sirius and Remus, and say _please. Please lie on either side of me while I sleep. Take turns keeping watch so you can tell me._

All right, not Sirius. But Remus. Imagine Remus, his big hands on the metamorph body beside him as it shifts back and forth, in and out of dreams. Tonks’s cock a heavy wooden door that swings suddenly in, the latch of her cunt clicking closed in its new frame.

Imagine Remus’s hand between her legs, steady in its pressure, never wavering as Tonks’s pleasure shifts from cock to cunt, then back and forth again.

And imagining that, stroking her cock, Tonks had trembled, and morphed to female again, and come. 

~

“Does it hurt when you morph?” Remus asked her. A week later, Friday night at Wands Out again. Neither of them had discussed meeting up, but there they both were, appearing at the bar at just the same time as the week before.

She looked down at her body—her usual female form. It might have been fun, she thought, to have met him as a bloke again, but she hadn’t changed out of her Auror robes, which meant she couldn’t assume any other appearance. There were strict regulations about that.

“Not exactly,” she answered. “I can’t always feel my fingers and toes, even when I’m not morphing, which isn’t always pleasant. That’s why I’m so clumsy.”

“I didn’t know that was the reason.”

“They say all morphers are. I’ve never met another one, so I wouldn’t know. ‘Destabilized corporeal boundaries,’ they call it. Sometimes my hands and feet feel pins and needles, like when your leg’s asleep. But I wouldn’t say it hurts. Not like it hurts for you.”

Remus looked away. “It’s not nearly as bad with wolfsbane,” he said quietly. And then lowered his voice further, so that she had to lean close to hear him. “Tonks. Have you heard anything more about the Werewolf Registry?”

“Only what you already know—that it’s been reactivated. But that’s just the usual Fudge, making grand gestures to show he’s on top of things.”

“Given how things are going for him, a rounding up of all Dark Creatures would be a nice demonstration of his on-topness, don’t you think?”

Tonks shook her head. “He wouldn’t,” she said. And then, seeing the look on Remus’s face, she added, “But if he did, I’d quit. Before I’d enforce a roundup, or anything like that. A lot of us would quit.”

“Perhaps not as many as you think. But it’s kind of you to say so.”

“I’m not being _kind._ Just principled. Even if I didn’t like you, Remus, I—” she stopped, feeling flustered. “I mean. It’s shite, isn’t it? but when the war’s over, things will change.”

Remus grimaced. “You’re an optimist, aren’t you?”

“Well, we’ve got to be, haven’t we?”

“I’ve been called many things, but never that.” His face grew a little softer. “What would Moody say if he heard you talking like this? ‘We’ve got to be optimists’ doesn’t sound quite in keeping with” —here Remus roughened his voice, and a passable imitation of Moody came out: ‘Constant vigilance.’”

She smiled, but Remus looked so grave.

“Remus,” she said, “there are things to be constantly vigilant for that aren’t impending attacks. And if you don’t look out for those, you’ll never notice them at all. Our side is stronger. It truly is.”

He looked at her then, his eyes on her face so long she felt her cheeks heat. Then he laughed. His voice was deeper in laughter than it was in speech, and his face grew soft. Was he laughing at her?

“What’s funny?” she asked.

Remus shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” he admitted. “I just—needed to breathe.” And he did, a breath so deep she heard it over the clamor of the bar, or perhaps it was because his barstool had somehow moved so close to hers. He sighed again, and the shadows on his face did not lift but seemed to deepen, to take root inside him. And again she caught the sense of his magic, and felt, with a thin shock, the animal in it. A man with a wolf shot through him. A wolf threaded into the complicated tweed of his coat, into the silver of his sandy hair, into the flare in his eyes. Now that she’d sensed it, she wondered how she could have missed it before. Was he always a little bit of both his forms? _Was_ there an in-between space where someone could be both? The thought had never occurred to her. She wanted to ask him, she wanted to know for herself. What would it look like, if she could be both her bodies at once? She could only morph into forms she had seen for herself. And she had never seen anything but one or the other.

 _Would you watch me while I slept?_ she thought again.

He was looking at her, hard.

“What are you thinking?” he asked suddenly.

Should she tell him? Would he be offended?

“About morphing, and your transformations,” she admitted. “And whether we’re both of our selves all the time. It’s in you all the time, isn’t it? The wolf.”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, his hair falling across his forehead. Not in denial, but as if he were trying to clear away an unpleasant thought.

“The wolf is very much on my mind tonight,” Remus said eventually. “I leave on Monday for the packs.”

A flare of emptiness inside her then, as if she’d gone to take a sip from her whisky glass and found the contents Vanished. “Dumbledore’s orders?” she asked.

“No.” Remus pressed his lips together, and then the lips smiled. “Dumbledore’s _request._ He never orders, you know. It’s always my choice. As much as anything is when—ah, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head, pushed his empty whisky glass away from him. “No more for me. I hope my thoughts are not as visible to everyone else as they are to you.”

“I’m not sure they’re even visible to me,” Tonks said.

And then Remus said he had to be getting back to Sirius, and they said goodnight.

~

The following Friday she found herself at Grimmauld Place. To check on Sirius, she told Moody when she left work. And—she did not tell Moody this—to see if Sirius had heard from Remus.

Sirius hadn’t. “But I never do,” he said. “Werewolf packs don’t use owls. Or any animal, for that matter. They kill, but they don’t enslave, is how Moony puts it. Different ethics all around.”

It was just the two of them, drinking on the little third floor balcony that looked out over the back garden. She was in her female body, of course. Since that night when they’d all danced, she hadn’t shown Sirius—or anyone else—the bloke body again.

“Can you ride a motorbike?” Sirius asked, partway through her second butterbeer. He’d been drinking Ogden’s when she arrived, and now had a bottle of each beside him, along with a packet of those crazy Muggle cigarettes he liked, the ones that smelled like a spice rack.

“Of course I can.” Tonks ran a hand through her pink hair and grinned. “Miranda Sprout, did you know her? Ravenclaw, two years ahead of me, Professor Sprout’s niece? She got a Muggle Norton my fifth year. She was the first butch dyke I ever met. She wouldn’t sleep with me, but she showed me the ropes. Gave me the coordinates for Wands Out, and took me to Chester’s for the first time, and she taught me to ride her Norton.” Tonks looked out over the chimney pots of the Muggle houses all around Grimmauld Place. “She’s dead now. Last year, when the Death Eaters blew up that bridge in South London.”

Sirius took a long drag off his clove cigarette and exhaled slowly, watching the smoke dissolve in the air.

“In Azkaban,” he said at last, “I spent a lot of time wondering who was still alive and who wasn’t. And after, I never quite got caught up. I tried to learn it, but I get confused. I can’t remember who died, or how.” He stubbed the cigarette out in the silver saucer he was using as an ashtray. “Tonks. You should try my bike.”

“You still have it? The one that flies?”

Sirius’s face broke into a slow smile. “A black Bonneville Triumph. You’d look great on it. A bit big for you maybe, if you’re riding as a girl, but you could handle it.”

“You’d teach me to fly it?”

“Of course not. You know I can’t leave the house. But you could take Moony out for a spin on the ground.”

Tonks’s foot kicked out all by itself, sending Sirius’s ashtray flying under the balcony railing and down into the back garden.

“Sorry,” Tonks began, and made to stand up to Accio it back, but Sirius waved his hand dismissively.

“Let it go. One less Noble and Most Ancient artifact to polish. As I was saying. I want you to take Moony out. You can ride Muggle style—he doesn’t like flying anyway. And it’d be good for him. And for me.”

“But—you don’t want to go yourself?”

Sirius took a long swig of Ogden’s. “You know I can’t.”

“I know you’re not sup _posed_ to leave, but we could Polyjuice you, after all, or we could—”

Sirius shook his head.

“I’m not doing that. I saw Harry off at King’s Cross the once and what did it get me? Lucius Malfoy spotted Padfoot, and now Voldemort knows I’m in contact with Harry.” He scowled. “And I’m supposed to be protecting him. Bollixed that up, didn’t I?” 

“We could Apparate you somewhere out of England. Just for a night or so. I _am_ an Auror, after all, I could get—”

“Godric’s fucking balls, you’re as bad as Remus. Shut it, will you? Just shut it.” His face was pale, his eyes a little wild. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. I’m—just listen, yeah? I’m trying to make you an offer.”

“I’m listening.”

“Right, then. I’m not leaving this house. That’s not up for debate. I don’t want to—it’s better this way. For Harry and so—for me. But it makes Remus feel he can’t leave either. Sure, he’ll go to Wands Out for an hour, and have his one drink, but then he trots straight home to me like a good little—” Sirius broke off, his lip curling in a way that on anyone else would have been ugly. “He hangs around here like he’s my bloody minder. It’s not good for either of us. It makes him hate me a little bit, actually.”

“Of course he doesn’t hate you.”

Sirius leaned back in his chair, tilting his head back against the bricks, his dark hair catching on curls of peeling paint. “I am easy to love _and_ easy to hate,” he said, his eyes smiling at her from under those thick lashes. Keep on being matey with us and you’ll see for yourself.”

Tonks opened her mouth and closed it again. Sirius waved his wand at the open balcony door and another silver saucer came floating out and settled itself at his feet.

“Moony and I used to go out a lot,” he said, tapping a new cigarette on the heel of his hand. “Before, I mean. We were so young, younger even than you are now, Tonks. We’d go out, pick up a bloke for the evening. So many pretty boys, back then. There was one bar—not Wands Out. Another place, Felix Felices. It’s gone now, I hear.” When he looked up at her again his eyes were soft. “Everything’s different, now, isn’t it? Not just the war. Everything. New diseases. All the old places closed down. Harry practically grown up. And now Remus and I are—different as well. We’re old—”

“You’re not even forty.”

“I bloody look like I’m fifty.”

He truly does sometimes, Tonks thought but did not say.

“And Moony _acts_ like he is. He spends all his time lurking about here fussing at me, or else he’s off with the werewolf packs trying not to get torn to shreds. He needs a bit of fun.”

“So you want me to what—take him out and not let him come home until he’s sucked some twink’s cock in the loo of Wands Out?”

“No! Merlin, Tonks. I want the two of you to go out and have fun. Go dancing if you want to, or take him to the bloody library, I don’t care. And—you know. It’s okay with me.” 

“What is?”

“Oh, come on, Auror.” He nudged Tonks’s boot. “I know you fancy him.”

Tonks knocked over her butterbeer.

“And I doubt you realize this, but he fancies you as well.” Sirius was grinning now. He moved his wand in a lazy sweep and the butterbeer collected itself into a little waterfall that poured itself back into the bottle.

“Show-off,” Tonks said. “I’m not drinking that now, you know.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Fine. Remus fancies me when I’m a bloke who looks just like you.”

“Even _I_ fancy you when you’re a bloke who looks just like me,” Sirius said smoothly. He sucked a curl of smoke from between his lips into his nostrils, his eyes on Tonks. “But no, that isn’t what I meant.”

“Quit winding me up.”

“I’m not winding you up.” Sirius exhaled slowly, the smoke escaping in an elegant curl. “Let’s just say your name has come up in Moony’s side of the conversation more than once. And as you may have noticed, he doesn’t exactly wear his heart on his sleeve. You’d need a N.E.W.T. in Legilimency, and possibly a few well-placed death threats, before he’d admit to what he’s feeling.”

The paint peeling off the balcony railing was suddenly fascinating, the way it curled up from the rusting wrought iron.

“Remus is your partner,” Tonks said at last.

“Which is why he can do with a break from the likes of me sometimes. I do with a break from him too, you know, when I can get it. I always have done. It keeps us—” Sirius broke off and laughed, not happily. “I don’t think I can still say ‘keeps us young.’ In any case, I trust you.”

“Trust me to do what? Or is it _not_ to do something?”

“Trust you to show him a good time, and—not mess him around. And not mess _us_ around. Him and me.”

“Well, I think you’re mad,” Tonks said.

“That,” said Sirius, “is a well-established fact. Very mad indeed. But not blind.”

She’d left then, claiming evening duty in Hogsmeade. Knocked her butterbeer bottle over a second time on the way out. Even though she’d been looking right at her boots, avoiding Sirius’s eyes.

What did it all mean? Remus was—what? Gay, she’d always assumed. Like Sirius. Remus would want her as a boy then, and perhaps that was the only way she’d want him as well, otherwise, what would it mean? She was queer, after all. But the whole idea was mad for another reason: she didn’t want another go-round with someone in Fleur’s situation. Someone who was, in effect, already married, and only wanted Tonks in one form and not the other.

She told herself that every time she thought of Remus, which meant she told it to herself more times a day than she could count, right up to the day she heard from Moody that Lupin had finally returned from Wales. She was still telling herself that it was mad when she Apparated to Wands Out the moment she got off work and found Remus already there, drinking alone at the bar. 

Her arms went around him, the tallness of him—she never remembered how tall he was until he was there again in front of her. He hugged her back, hard. With her face pressed against his chest she realized with a start that her female body fancied him just as much as the male one. Which surprised her. She was queer, after all, and so was he, so—

“Thank you for keeping Sirius company so often while I was away,” Remus was saying.

She let go of him and signaled to the barman.

“I’m sure he’s glad you’re back,” Tonks said, wondering what else Sirius had told him.

“I’m glad I’m back, too,” Remus answered. And did she imagine the heat in his gaze when he said it? It went through her like a warming charm cast too hard.

She ordered each of them a pint and a whisky, remembering that they both liked the Muggle Scotch better than Ogden’s. She knew better than to ask him about the packs, and she was glad when he returned the favor by not asking her about the Ministry. They talked about Harry a bit, and then Remus asked her about the Quidditch match she’d seen the Sunday before. Tell me, he said, about Holyhead.

And that was when she knew. Because everyone—probably even the portrait of Walburga Black—knew that Remus Lupin did not give a damn about Quidditch.

“You don’t care a fig about the Harpies,” she said.

His mouth twitched, as if it were trying to smile and not being allowed.

“And furthermore, Remus, you’re staring at my mouth.”

Remus’s eyes crinkled up into the smile his mouth wasn’t having. He licked his lips and didn’t deny it. He looked—not embarrassed, exactly, but a little shy. She imagined what his lips would taste like. The smoky Muggle scotch they were drinking. And wind, because Remus always looked a little windblown, even when he hadn’t been outside. And sweet too, and—

“And you’re staring at mine,” Remus answered. He set his whisky glass down on the bar.

“I caught you first.” Tonks tilted her head back, challenging. Stuck her thumbs through her belt loops, a long seam of desire splitting open inside her, and wondered: What happens now?

“Your mouth,” Remus said, so quietly that she could barely hear him over the noise in the bar, “Is the same shape on both your faces.”

“And _your_ mouth,” Tonks returned, “wants kissing.” She leaned forward to do it and he caught her by the wrists as she tripped, the toe of her boot catching in the rung of the barstool.

And then he was holding her wrists, holding her back from him.

Fuck. Fuck.

But he kept holding her, did not let go as he brought his head down close to her ear.

“Not here,” he whispered. “This is a gay bar.”

 _A queer bar_ , Tonks would have said. _And we’re queer, so._

Just so. He was a bloke, and she was—she was in a female body. Tits under her leather jacket, not small. And between her legs her cunt—zinging for _him_. For a person with a man’s hard chest and narrow hips and a cock in his trousers. Holding her wrists in his big hands, and the lust in his face burning through her and what the fuck should they do now?

She gathered in, began to morph herself male. Fuck it if people saw her shifting; she didn’t care.

“ _Wait_.”

Remus shifted his grasp to hold her hands instead of her wrists, awkwardly pulling her closer as he fumbled to interlink their fingers. Tonks’s hair was going back and forth between pink and black, her diminished breasts swelling up again. She felt dizzy, and gripped his hands back.

“Tonks.” Remus took a breath, frowning in concentration. “You—look, I’ve been talking to _this_ version of you” —he gave her small hands a squeeze— “all evening. I’d rather like it if...if she didn’t leave just yet.” His hazel eyes found hers for a moment, then dropped to his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go of her hands. “That can’t have been the right thing to say. I should say—” he looked up at her again. “I _want_ to say. Please be whatever shape you’d like to kiss me in.” 

Tonks tried to catch her breath, felt the morph finish female. She tried to hold steady as she shifted her weight solidly back over her feet, moving to stand as close to Remus as she could without actually touching him. Heat radiated off him like a tall flame in an alcohol lamp, pale and burning.

“Hold your arm out,” she said.

When he did, she linked her arm through his and swept her wand.

They reformed in her bedroom, where Tonks stood on tiptoe and kissed him at last. He tasted of Scotch and skin and heat, and he opened for the kiss she gave, deep and full of relief that it had happened, sinking into it, mouths learning each other while the Remus-scent of his hair, his skin, a strangely male scent, swallowed her senses until she had to take his lower lip between her teeth and bite into the fullness of it and hold him there, hear him moan in her mouth while she held him still and breathed him. Then walked him backward to the bed. When his calves hit the mattress, Remus fell back, pulling her on top of him.

Their bodies so different from one another’s. He was so much taller, and his arms flocked with dark gold hair, and his face so rough on her smooth cheek. But hunger of tongue and teeth and heat—those things the same. Same in the shared breath passed back and forth. Slick lips sucking—same. In the grind of her clit through her jeans on his groin, the grind of his cock on her hip, hard inside his trousers, hard for _her_ body, swelling and leaking with need to be touched—same. She pressed her weight on top of him, pressed his arms against the mattress, sucked his tongue until he groaned around her and she drew back to look at him, flushed and tousled beneath her.

With the gray in his hair catching silver in the streetlight outside, and the too-deep lines at the corners of his eyes, and he looked so turned on, and so awkward, he looked—fucking edible, his huge hands trembling in her small ones as she brought them up, guiding them under her shirt.

And then, suddenly, he was laughing, she didn’t know why, but he was beautiful when he laughed, and something more, something a little heartbreaking.

“I haven’t been with a woman in years,” he said, spitting his hair out of his eyes because Tonks was still holding his hands against her belly. “I’m not sure I know what to do.”

“I can shif—” Tonks caught herself. That wasn’t what he was asking. “I can show you,” she finished.

“I want you to,” he murmured, moving his hands in hers up inside her shirt to cup her breasts. He looked up, his eyes dark with arousal and a flare of amber in the hazel that she hadn’t noticed before. “Show me,” he said. “What you want.”

“It’s all girl bits under these jeans, you know.”

“I am aware of that,” said Remus dryly, and then they both laughed.

“Take my shirt off,” she told him.

He did, sitting up and fumbling it so awkwardly over her breasts, over her head, it was as if he were the one with displaced corporeal boundaries. So, still straddling him, she Vanished the bra.

He touched the steel ring in her left nipple with one finger and looked up at her.

“Can I.” He closed his eyes. “Suck you.”

The way he said it. As if he thought she would say no. As if he wanted it so much he had to ask anyway.

She cupped her breast, offering. At first he only held the ring between his teeth. His lips barely there and the breath of him burning her, her nipples hard for him, aching to be sucked.

 _Do it_ she ordered, and he fell to. Feeding. Found her other nipple with his fingers and held it hard. Her cunt flooding at the pressure, hard and hard and hard he twisted and then let go. She pulled his hair— _again, more_ — until he brought his fingers back, tweaked her again. The moaning was coming from her. She reached her hands down and unbuckled his belt. Unzipped him.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Yes,” he mouthed, his teeth clicking against her nipple ring.

Yes to a cock touched through thin pants, a cock not Tonks’s own. Yes to taking him out, his cock hard silk and hot in her fingers. She made a fist around him the way she would around her own cock and stroked up, then, more firmly, down. He threw back his head and thrust into her hand.

And then he was unsnapping her jeans, and she struggled to work herself out of them, but they were too tight on female Tonks’s arse, and hard to slip over her hips. Let’s Vanish these damn things, she said but her wand was in its Auror’s arm holster, which came off with her shirt, and his wand was pinned to his thigh beneath her legs. He slid out from under her, slid all the way to the floor beside the bed. She scooted to the edge of the mattress and he pulled her blue jeans down. He paused at seeing the boy’s Y-fronts.

“I own _one_ kind of pants,” she informed him.

“Will you lie back?” he asked.

She would. And then he peeled down the Y-fronts too.

With one finger he traced down the fine trail of hair below her navel, traced down over her mons, over the hood of her clit. She watched his face as he watched his finger move down over the closed folds of her labia, then down to the leak in the slit. Touching there, into the slick.

She moaned out—a bright electric _more_.

His eyes flickered from her cunt to her face. She could only nod, biting her lip—the words were somewhere else. She watched him bend over her again, bringing both of his hands between her legs. Felt his fingers take the furled wings of her labia and slowly, slowly, open them. Felt herself flood as he gave a low broken cry and looked up to her face, his eyes flaring in the darkness.

“You let me,” he said. “You’re letting me.”

More slick leaked from her cunt.

“I’ll let you finger me—”

“Fingerfuck you. And—suck you there—”

“Please—” Inside her something was breaking.

His finger touching the flat between her clit and her hole.

He touched. Stopped. Touched. Stopped.

“Fuck, Remus. _Touch_ me.”

“Your clit?” His face flushed with color. “Or inside you?”

She couldn’t think, she wanted both, wanted him to do all of it. She wanted him to keep teasing and she wanted to be fucked.

“Play inside me,” she said, and it came out begging.

Remus’s breath caught as the tip of his finger slipped barely inside her and then everything in her was breaking right there, breaking all the way open. She thrust her hips up, and then his finger was all the way inside her, then pulling out so slowly and leaving her empty again. He was watching her face and then she had to shut her eyes because she was breaking. He was breaking her. Fuck me she begged, and then thank god he was pushing his finger back in. But then gone again.

“Don’t stop—and my clit—”

“Move my head,” he growled, “show me.” Tonguing up between her spread lips, almost to her clit, almost almost—and she took hold of his head and _there_ , his tongue on her there, and his finger teasing back into her cunt, so good as he tongued her, _there there there_ , the tip of his tongue flicking hard against her clit and she was riding up and up and that’s when it happened.

The morphing, all by itself. She chased after it, trying to keep herself female, but the other body had already formed around the vibrating core that was almost her orgasm and her cock was swelling, up into Remus’s mouth.

His eyes went wide, staring up at her, but he didn’t stop. He took hold of the shaft and bobbed his head, his tongue rough on the underside of the glans. Tonks shuddered all over, thrusting into his mouth and then, bloody fuck, the morph kept going and she was female again, and it had never happened like this, but Remus was holding her, saying _Give it to me, give me both_. And Tonks was so close, and he kept flicking her clit with his tongue, kept fucking her, his fingers deep in her cunt as she came, morphing her into pure vibrations of pleasure.

The waves of the orgasm rippled through her with Remus’s mouth on her clit, his fingers deep in the flooded slit of her cunt. And then as she began to come down, the morphing rode in again. Her body pushing Remus’s fingers out of her, her clit lengthening into cock, pushing into his mouth. And Remus sucking it in, sucking her cock and not even hesitating, and Tonks writhing on the bed, she should pull her cock free from Remus’s mouth before—

“I’m coming again,” she choked out. Remus tightened his lips around the shaft. Held her there. Let her shoot off in the heat of his mouth.

Her male body shuddering through the wake of the orgasm then. Tonks pulled Remus up on top of her flat chest and kissed him, her cock between them, his own cock hard against her softening one. Remus’s mouth was shining with her slick, with her spunk. Tonks kissed him, tasting both of her selves on his lips. Kissed the taste of both of the bodies that were hers, and started to cry.

Remus said nothing, but he’d held on. Stroked his hands through Tonks’s black hair and held on. Held on while the female body came back. Stroked his hands over and over through Tonks’s pink hair and kept holding. Said, _You’re a wonder_. Soft in her ear, his voice so full.

And after, lying together. The way he’d wanted to discover her body at rest. Not only that night, but night after night. She had never been with anyone who would have sex with both her forms. And Remus not only enjoyed both, he wanted to know them. He wanted to lie beside her after they’d both come, and, with a lover’s attention and care, lay his big hand against the shape of her body’s morph and ask her questions.

“You’re circumcised,” he said once, his hand loosely holding the softening cock that had so recently been in his mouth. “Did you choose that because you like it better? Or did your parents...?”

Tonks laughed.

“It wasn’t my parents’ doing. It’s just the way it comes out when I’m a bloke. I must have seen my dad when I was small and thought that’s how everyone was. He’s Jewish.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s no reason you would. His parents taught him to hide it when he was a boy, and when he went to school, they changed their name from Tunik to Tonks. They were war refugees from Russia. They died when I was small. I remember them, though—I look quite a bit like Grandma Tonks when I’m a woman.”

“I never knew any of that.”

Tonks slid a hand along her cock, touched the smooth head of it to the wrinkle of Remus’s foreskin. He was always so warm. It made her feel as if the war—all the wars, ever—were somewhere far away. 

“I don’t choose the way I look in either of these bodies,” she told him. “If I changed my appearance to something different, it would take energy to keep the morph going. But it doesn’t with these two bodies. Which makes them my real ones, I suppose.” 

He slid his hand up to her stubbled chin, to the wide mouth whose contours were so clearly of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

“If your bloke form came from what you saw in the people around you,” he said, “you must have seen Sirius and Regulus quite often.”

Tonks shook her head.

“I didn’t see them at all. But Andromeda kept a picture of them on our piano. I used to stare at it—the cousins whose nasty mother wouldn’t let them visit us. I so much wanted brothers and sisters, Remus. I used to pretend Sirius and Regulus were mine.”

Remus stroked the planes of Tonks’s bloke face, its high cheekbones.

“Lucky for you they were so handsome,” he said. “If you’d had a picture of me on your piano, you would’ve been covered in scars.”

Tonks traced a finger across the scar she knew Remus hated most, because he couldn’t hide it: two faint lines of raised skin that ran from the bridge of his nose to the outer edge of his right eye.

“I would have been,” she agreed. “Because I look like the people I wanted to be close to.”

Remus had almost blushed. She felt his cheeks grow hot under her hand until he pulled her fingers into his mouth and began sucking them.

Yes, they were both happy once. She is sure of it.

~

Not that there were not struggles before they became parents. Not that it was ever what you would call easy.

There was the war, of course. There was Remus’s lack of work. And there was Sirius. The time, a month or so into their dating, when Remus had Apparated onto her doorstep in the middle of the night with blood all over his shirt.

She thought he’d been attacked.

He shook his head, looking more exhausted than she’d ever seen him.

“It’s not my blood,” he said. “Sirius had a rough night.”

“Is he all right?”

“He is now. He had to put his fist through a couple of windows first.”

“Merlin. Why?”

“Because he’s Sirius.” Remus’s eyes darted malevolently around the room; he looked as if he wanted to punch out a window himself. “Because he spent twelve years in Azkaban. Because Walburga. Because Snape looked at him cross-eyed earlier this evening. What kind of answer do you want me to give?”

“I’m sorry. I just—”

Remus sighed, and his whole body seemed to deflate.

“Tonks. Don’t apologize to me for my rudeness, all right? Just—don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

Tonks crossed her arms over the front of the tee shirt she’d been sleeping in and stared him into looking at her.

“Or you could just answer the question I asked you,” she said. “That’s also an option.”

Remus closed his eyes a moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “The answer is that Sirius is only ever truly angry at himself. Even when he’s vilifying Snape. That’s something I didn’t understand for years. Also that he’s afraid to go outside—that’s what twelve years of Azkaban did to him. Did you know that’s why he won’t leave Grimmauld Place? It’s not about staying safe for Harry. It’s not about keeping Number Twelve for the Order. It’s that he gets fucking spooked, Tonks. For a while it was all right as long as he was Padfoot. But now he can’t do it at all.”

“Merlin. That’s horrible.”

“And I pushed him about it. I bloody well know better, and I pushed him.”

“Should we go over there? I could come with you.”

Remus sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets and then taking them out again. “I’m not generous enough to say yes right now. I need a break.” He looked up at her, suddenly tentative. “Could I stay here? We don’t have to—I mean, I realize I’m dropping in uninvited. You were asleep. I could take the couch.”

“Don’t be a git,” Tonks said, and pushed him into the bedroom.

He was rigid, every muscle tense. She kneaded them out and it made no difference. She pushed her palms hard into his shoulders, his glutes, his thighs. then softer, fingers teasing over his arse cheeks. It was turning her on, having him beneath her. He was only half here, she knew, but as she touched him she could feel him turning present again, feel his magic begin to spark inside him, tense and electric, as she pressed her hands into his skin. It was turning her on—not his distress, exactly, but her ability to call his energy forth.

She spread his bare legs, kept touching. Began dragging her fingers light over his arse cheeks, watching as his sac tightened over his balls. He groaned and shifted on the bed. She was wet for him, her bare cunt damp. She cupped his bollocks, drew her finger soft into the cleft of his arse to touch the softest part of this taut and powerful man. She wanted to be inside him, then, release the thing she could feel coiled tight inside him. She wanted to feel what she could make his body do. 

“Can I fuck you?” she whispered.

He looked back over his shoulder at her, his face flushed with arousal and trouble, a question in his eyes.

“With my fingers, Remus. That’s how I fuck as a woman. I’ll fingerfuck your arse until you come screaming.”

“Tonks.” His voice turned husky. “Would you—Incarcerous me first. I want something to...to strain against. I don’t want to hold back with you.”

She had him tied up on his back almost before he’d finished speaking, his hands cuffed and bound, one to each bedpost. She conjured rings on each side of the bed, snaked cords around his legs just above the knees and drew his knees up to his chest, leaving him spread open before her. Then she Vanished her tee shirt and knelt naked before his naked self, her breasts in her hands as she surveyed her work. He was already fully hard, and his arsehole was trembling.

“Tweak my nipples,” she said.

His hands jerked reflexively toward her, straining against the bonds.

“Can’t do it? Here, let me.” She fingered them herself, rose-colored pebbles at the tips of her breasts. “Now give me that hard cock, Remus.”

His hips thrust toward her, his cock jumping against his belly. She watched him.

“Can’t reach me? I’ll have to get it myself then.” She wrapped her hand around his shaft and pointed the tip of his cock toward her cunt. Raised herself up on her knees and spread her legs. Slid his foreskin back and dragged his cockhead down the length of her slit, just barely parting her. The feel of him there surged through her body. She rubbed him against her clit, arching into it, the pressure of him electric as his eyes fluttered closed and he groaned. She drew the hood back from her clit.

“I could fuck your cockslit,” she told him, and he groaned louder, a half-sob now.

Holding the head of his cock, she drew the small mouth at the tip of his prick open, dragged it up through the slick of her until the glistening nub of her clit touched the tip of that smallest hole. She pressed into him, and the tiny penetration exploded inside her, racing from clit to everywhere.

“Show me a bigger hole,” she commanded. His knees trembled as he tried to hike his legs higher, but his thighs were already pressed against his chest.

“So tight—” she said, pressing just the tip of her finger against him.

“Open me up, Tonks, please—”

“—but so greedy for it.”

She slipped a finger inside her cunt. Streaming wet. She touched her slickened finger to the furled skin of his arsehole and Remus whipped his head against the pillow.

Swirled hole in the center of his self, and soon she’d be inside him there. His arse a split-open fruit like a cunt.

But it would not be like fucking a girl. And not like being a bloke fucking another bloke, either.

It would be like this. Her finger in herself, drowning in her juices. And then that finger lubing his hole with her slick. Pressing her finger inside him.

“Oh—oh fuck, Tonks—feel you—”

Her finger slowly turning in.

“Come on, fuck, another finger. Want you to fuck me—”

“Say the spell,” she commanded.

He must have done it wordlessly, because then his hole was as slick as hers, leaking like her cunt was leaking. His body gripping her finger, the feel of heat of him. And his face on the pillow flushed, his mouth open.

“Fuck me,” he whined, jerking his hands against the cords.

And she did. Slowly. Drawing her finger out, shining with lubricant, easing back in again. Rotating her finger until she felt against her fingertip the ridges of his prostate. She gave a light, tentative stroke and Remus hissed, hips jerking.

 _Yes_ , he hissed. _Yes_.

But slowly. Easing her finger in, drawing back across that one spot, walnut nubbled in the smooth wall.

“Fuck, Tonks, more, just do it. More. Fuck me—”

“Look at you, trussed up and begging already. You want three fingers?”

“Yes, and—faster—”

“But you’re so tight, Remus.”

His legs shaking in the cords as he tried to maneuver them farther apart, to spread wider.

“So greedy when you’re tied up.” She smiled wickedly. “Can’t move. Can’t hide. Have to take your fucking at my pace. And I think slow—”

“I said _faster_.” His eyes flared almost angry, and she felt adrenalin swoop through her arousal like it did when she was on an Auror Mission and a fight was coming. She thrust in.

“Fuck, like that—”

“Tell me to spread you.”

“Spread me open. I want you to fuck me. Fuck me _now_.”

She put her palm against his arse and parted him. Exposed hole, shining lubed creases drawing taut as she works in three fingers, her cunt swooping up to her throat at the way he moaned as his arse sucked her in. She curled her fingers inside him again and Remus shuddered on the pillow and then she was fucking him, fucking in straight, the pads of her fingers curling against the rippled place inside him over and over until he was writhing on the bed and his tension gathered in her cunt, her own magic rushing out through her hand and up inside him as she fucked his arse until he threw back his head and howled. No other word for it, a man making an animal sound like that.

He was almost there. She took her fingers out of him just long enough to drop the full weight of her body on his, her cunt pressed against his cock, slick on his cock as she began to rock against him. Then she reached behind herself and found his hole again, so open for her. She fucked her fingers in again, her clit catching and catching on the lip of the glans of his prick as she slid against him, her fingers thrusting inside his arse.

Remus howled again, whipping his head, and she caught his voice in her mouth. His teeth in her lip as she thrust her tongue, making his mouth open, making his hole open. Tonks rubbing off against his cock as she fucked him with her fingers, chasing her own orgasm now. Sliding down the pole of his cock again again again and then her cunt clenching, mouth clenching, her body vibrating her magic down into him, out over him, filling the whole room as she came.

Her hand shaking with it, stuttering inside him as he bucked up, seeking the rhythm again. Her cunt swollen so wet against him, press and press and press as her orgasm peaked. Press and hold and shudder as it subsided. Only then did she remember her hand inside him, and began working her fingers inside him again, the spread of her cunt sliding slick-spent over his rigid cock, and then Remus was coming too, his teeth in her mouth, his cock spurting against her belly and his arsehole spasming so tight so tight around her hand.

 

“ _They_ could have tied me up,” he said after. She had untied him, and his head was buried in her hair.

“What? Who could’ve?”

“Dumbledore. Pomfrey. My parents. They could have tied me up and stayed with me when I changed. I didn’t have to rip my chest open every month from the time I was six years old.” He pressed closer, his voice muffled against the top of her head. “They thought it would have been cruel, to chain me like an animal. They never wanted me to be an animal. Never. Only Sirius and James and Peter understood.”

His heart beating so hard against her ribs.

“Remus. Would you ever want—I could be a wolf, maybe. I could try. I’d need to see you first, when you were changed. I’d need to touch you and smell you and feel your body. But I think I could do it.”

He nuzzled his face against her forehead then, and when she turned up her chin, he kissed her, small light kisses all over her cheeks, her eyelids, her nose.

“Is that a yes?” she asked.

A wolf. A silver-pelted wolf. The elegant head, the senses concentrated in the nose. They could run together.

“No, Tonks.” Remus smiled sadly. “I don’t want you to see me when I’m changed.”

 _But Sirius_ —she wanted to say. Feeling her face fall.

“I know, I let Sirius see me,” he said. “And—I love that you want to. That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years. I love that you feel that way. I love that you—” he pressed his lips together. And then, correcting himself: “I love you.” 

And then hid his face again, his breath hot on her throat. But a strand of his magic that was all wolf slipped inside her, and turned around and around in her heart, and then lay down in the place it had made and slept. 

That was the night she understood what Sirius had been trying to tell her, that Sirius’s imprisonment at Grimmauld Place really was a prison for Remus as well. Sirius had been right about taking Remus out: when Remus climbed up behind her on the bike she could actually feel the tension fall from his body, see him settle into himself with more ease as he came to inhabit her life for a while. She saw him watch with something like amazement as Tonks in her female body threw on her leathers, grabbed Remus by the arm and pulled him up behind her and roared across London. They’d dance and drink at Wands Out and Remus would laugh and seem happy, truly happy, until the inevitable thing happened to send his face shuttering closed again. Never the same thing, but always something. Sometimes it was the war that did it: a gasbag at the bar talking too loudly about blood status. A year earlier, talk like that would have got the tosser thrown out, but now, the barman simply stared daggers at him and then turned away, disappeared into the back room. Conversation would resume around the mouthy pureblood, too loud in the silence his words had left, and Remus would grab her hand and pull them towards the exit. Other times it was Tonks herself, as when she tried to snog him in the middle of the dance floor.

“Not here,” he said. “You know how I feel about that.”

“Yes, but people are snogging all over this dance floor. Look around you.”

“Then morph, Tonks. If you want me to kiss you like this”—he jutted his chin at her breasts—“we’ll go to a straight place.”

“We’re not straight! Look at yourself. Look at me, Remus.” At her buzzed pink hair, at the way she stood, so solid in her body, at her men’s denims low on her big hips, at the way she could stand in a roomful of men with nothing scurrying out to please and thank you. The way she could gaze at a woman at the bar until the unsuspecting witch felt it, and looked up and blushed. “Wands Out _is_ my place,” she retorted.

He’d taken her by the hand and led her off the dance floor then, out the back door past the loos, out to the alley in back.

“ _This_ is your place,” he said, pulling her against him, his hipbone pressing her clit through their clothes.

“This is your place,” he whispered, lifting her against him, catching her mouth and giving the kiss she’d asked for inside, hungry and full of tongue. _This is your place_ , he growled at her throat, the last word turning into a groan as she ground herself hard against his erection, and they rubbed against each other until they both came. In the alley, beside a skip full of empty liquor bottles.

That was not the place she wanted.

All right then, Tonks thought. He wants respectability in public, I’ll give it to him. We’ll do something respectable. And Tonks the bloke, looking dashing in a suit-cut leather jacket and a small goatee, threaded her black clad arm through Remus’s tweed one and whisked him off to Ottery St. Catchpole, Remus blinking in the sunlight as if startled to find himself paraded through the village with this young wizard on his arm, buttery leather jacket and fashionably tight but still perfectly respectable trousers and beneath the cuffs, those motorcycle boots. A visit to Arthur and Molly, who had been pestering her to bring Remus around.

“Change back now, Tonks, would you,” he said, when they’d turned in the lane and the Burrow was nearly in sight.

“Why?” Tonks wanted to know. Fingering the goatee, which really looked quite handsome.

“Because we’re going to the Weasleys.”

“What’s wrong with going like this?”

“They’ll think we’re—I don’t know. Mocking them. Come on, now.”

“What does that mean? Of course we’re not mocking them. We’re just us. They know I’m a morpher. And that we’re together.”

“Please, Tonks,” he said. “Just—I’m too old and tired for this kind of show.”

“It’s not a show, Remus. It’s who we are.”

“Is it?” he asked.

Which hurt.

“Well, it’s how I am,” she persisted. “You like this body fine when it’s bringing you off, but now you won’t go to Sunday roast with it? You’re with me, and I’m like this right now. I don’t want to go back to pretending I’m some other way. It’s not meant to tick off Arthur and Molly, or make them uncomfortable, or—Remus, it’s not anything to do with them, really.”

“Then why are we having this conversation?” Remus asked.

And having no answer for that, she gave in and morphed back to her woman’s body, adding long red hair and a dusting of freckles.

“There, I look just like them now, are you happy?”

“Tonks, don’t be like that.”

“I’ll fit right in; that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Now they _will_ think you’re mocking them.”

So she’d vanished the hair and freckles, and went in her beautifully-tailored bloke clothes that no longer fit right, her breasts tight inside a too-long shirt. Her trousers unbuttoned at the top to accommodate a larger belly, and her boots too loose. She went, and fumed through what should have been a pleasant meal.

~

Later that evening, Tonks went looking for Sirius. She found him holed up in his old bedroom drinking. She took the Ogden’s out of his hand and had a pull. Put the bottle down on the nightstand and did not knock it over.

“Sirius,” she said, “Your boyfriend is driving me up the wall.”

“ _Your_ boyfriend, cousin. My partner.”

That hurt, too. Which surprised her–she’d known the hierarchy, going in. She pushed that feeling aside, to be looked at later.

“All right then. He’s your partner and my boyfriend. And he’s driving me nuts. When we’re alone, it’s brilliant. But when we get out in public, it’s like he’s ashamed of me.”

Sirius leaned back against the headboard and corrected her. “Not of you, Tonks.”

“Well he might as well be, if it comes to the same thing. It’s like he’s in the fucking closet all the time, no matter what body I have, and I’m bloody sick of it, you know?” She hadn’t meant to sound so angry.

Of course Sirius knew. Sirius had loved Remus since they were children. And Sirius would have happily gone to Sunday roast at the Burrow in a sodding Twiggy dress and white go-go boots if someone asked him to. If he would let himself leave the bleeding house.

“Remus is _queer_ ,” she pressed on when Sirius said nothing. “He’s like us.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Moony’s a fucking _deviant_ , right down to his sodding bones. Give me my bottle.”

He hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of a glass, Tonks noted. Although he didn’t seem drunk, for that.

“So what do you suggest?” she asked, handing it over.

“I can tell you what _I_ do,” he said, “when Moony gets...hmm...what shall we say? Resistant?” He grinned, something in his face gone hard. “I shift to Padfoot and start laving his cock.”

Tonks began to laugh. “You do not.”

“Until he’s begging me to shift back so he can fuck me. But I just keep licking him. Then I move on to his arsehole, at which point he’ll admit to just about anything.”

“ _Merlin_. You actually rim him when you’re a dog?”

“‘It’s still me in there, you prat’—I believe that’s how your argument goes?”

“Yes, but...fuck. All right, _touché._ ”

“Besides, Padfoot’s got an incredible tongue.” 

“Wow. I—Merlin, Sirius. Give me a swig of that.”

Sirius passed the bottle. He was looking hard at her.

“When you’re a bloke,” he asked, “does Moony fuck your arse?”

Tonks was taken aback. “He—we—I thought Remus told you everything.”

“I stopped asking,” Sirius said. And looked away.

Oh. Oh, dear.

“He doesn’t,” Tonks said after a moment. Carefully. “I’ve never done it that way. And besides, Remus told me...that that was something he only does with you.”

Sirius looked back at her, searching her face.

“Moony said that?”

She nodded.

“And what about the other way?”

“Well, yeah.” She felt her cheeks color. “Sometimes I fuck him.”

Sirius’s mouth made an O shape. Tonks wondered if she wasn’t supposed to have answered truthfully.

“I meant, does Moony fuck you when you’re a _girl_.” Sirius scowled at the whisky bottle. “But no matter. Good to know.”

“Sirius, you asked me. I—”

“It’s all right. I did ask you. You answered.”

Tonks reached out her hand and tentatively touched Sirius’s knee. When he didn’t pull away, she said, “Do you mind very much? That it’s become more serious than you intended?”

“I think you mean, that it’s become more _Tonks_ than I intended.” With one finger he traced a circle on the back of her hand. “I was never good at chess,” he said after a moment. “That’s a game Moony likes. Planning all the moves in advance, figuring out how it’s all going to go. I’m more the Quidditch type—I react best with my reflexes. Moony trying to play nursemaid was miserable for both of us, that’s all I was thinking about—a way to get him out of my hair. We were fighting, a lot. We’ve both been happier since you came along.” He sighed, and took his hand away, fumbled in his trousers for something that wasn’t there. He rummaged under the pillow and drew out a rumpled clove cigarette packet, which he held out to Tonks. She saw that his elegant hands were trembling.

“Give us a light, then,” he said.

Tonks tapped out a cigarette, lit it with the tip of her wand, and passed it back to Sirius, who inhaled and then coughed.

“So you fuck him when you’re a bloke,” he said.

“Sirius, are you sure you want to hear—”

“I’m asking aren’t I?” Sirius growled.

“I—Yes. I have done. Twice, I think. I fuck him more when I’m a woman. I seem to be more of a top in this body.”

“When you’re a woman,” he repeated. “With a strap-on, you mean? Or, a...a girl with a cock?”

“With my fingers. I like that. Using my hand...inside him.”

Sirius was quiet again, the fragrant smoke twisting around them.

Was she making it worse? Should she go?

“Moony liked me to do him that way when we were at Hogwarts,” he said eventually, his voice soft and distant. “Get him off with my fingers in his arse. But after I came back, we...we didn’t pick that up again. I don’t know why, really. He’s more—closed, now, maybe?” He brushed a hand across his cheeks. “Or at least, closed to me.”

“Remus loves you more than anythi—”

“Spare me that humiliation, yeah? My partner’s lover telling me I’m still in the mix?”

“Sirius, for him you _are_ the mix.” 

He didn’t reply. She sat beside him on the bed in silence and watched him drink and smoke. And wipe away one stray tear. And then another.

“There’s a canine thing,” he said after a while. “A pack thing. It’s been stronger between us since I came back. Remus is more wolf now than he was before, despite the wolfsbane. He’s had more years of being one, I guess. And I spent so much time as Padfoot, all those years in Azkaban—I’m more of a dog, too. And when I came back, I needed Moony to—to own me again. And he wanted to—you know, be the alpha. When we fuck. It’s good like that for us. It’s really good. But maybe we ought to, I don’t know. Try other things again. D’you know, I’ve never talked about this? Anyway--”

“Sirius. I think you and I should both have at him.”

“You mean together?”

She nodded.

He smiled at her and his face was suddenly handsome again. Beautiful, even now.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

“But Sirius, I’d want to do it as a girl. A butch girl. With a strap-on, if you like, but with this body. A woman’s body.”

“Er, Tonks?” Sirius looked slightly frightened.

“Oi, Sirius. I’m not asking you to fondle my bits. You don’t even have to touch me.”

“But surely it’s...easier, for all three of us to be blokes?

“Remus always likes things to be easier. That’s part of the problem.”

“You’d want things easier too, Tonks, if you’d had his life.”

“But if it lets him lie to himself? About who he really is?”

“Ah.” Sirius took a long swig of whisky. “I see.” He set down the bottle and regarded her with those slaty eyes, that famous Sirius Black smolder. A look such that, even when you knew perfectly well he didn’t want to fuck you, you might be excused for thinking he did.

“We’ll get Moony between us, then,” he said.

“And we won’t let him escape.”

“We’ll tie him up and roger him”—Sirius was laughing now—

“—until he admits everything.”

“That he’s a werewolf” —Sirius held up one finger—

“—who fucks both blokes and women—” Tonks held up two more—

“—and _dogs_ —” Sirius waved his whole hand in the air—

“—and that we love him for it—”

Silence.

“I mean—” Tonks stammered.

“It’s all right,” Sirius said. “I already knew you felt that way.”

“Sirius. I don’t want to get in the way of what two you have. Not that I even could, I mean—”

Sirius lifted his hand and touched two fingers to her mouth. She broke off, startled. Then he leaned against her shoulder and put his arm around her.

“Butch girl,” he said softly into the buzzed hair at the back of her neck, “not only are you not in the way. I don’t know how we’d get on without you. We’d kill each other, probably. When we were young we had James, and Peter too, to—spread our attention around, I guess. But when it’s only us—we’re not such easy people to love, Remus and I. But you are. Easy to love, that is. And I—”

He let go of her, and covered his face with his hands.

“I’m not drunk,” he said, tears cracking his voice. “That’s not why I’m not making sense.”

Tonks ran her hand over his back. “I love you too, you know,” she said.

Sirius let himself fall sideways, his head coming to rest in her lap. Tonks began stroking his hair, over and over. Not talking. Just stroking him, staying with him on the bed until night fell and Kingsley arrived to start the Order meeting.

 

The three-way never happened. A week after that conversation, Sirius was dead.

 

Even now, two years on, Tonks cannot think of him without feeling the stab in her chest. And then, right behind that, the annihilating void of Remus’s grief. Two years on, and still Remus will not speak of it. They each blame themselves for Sirius’s death, as everyone who was there that day blames themselves. Tonks knows that Remus also blames Harry, though he will not speak of that either. She knows that Remus wanted Harry to be Teddy’s godfather in part as penance for his ongoing anger at a boy who did not master, at age fifteen, an Occlumency that even most adult wizards couldn’t have managed.

 _Too old, too poor, too dangerous_. Those were the reasons Remus gave when, in the terrible months between Sirius’s death and Dumbledore’s, people asked why he and Tonks had broken up. But in truth there was only one reason: _Too broken by grief_ , he should have said. Would Molly and Arthur have understood that?

Tonks had understood it. And suffered through her own grieving alone. Grieving for all three of them, really, forever separate now. But when Dumbledore died, Remus came back to her, incoherent with sorrow, and they did not get up from Tonks’s bed for three days.

They didn’t plan what happened next. They barely spoke at all. Their bodies simply fell into position as if they’d known all along that this was where they would end up. Tonks the bloke who looked every inch a Black, and Remus fucking him, over and over and over, their two bodies working in tandem to conjure Sirius back between them.

And sometimes they actually did. That was the beautiful and terrible thing about that kind of fucking. Tonks would feel Sirius’s magic inside her, alive inside her for a moment, and then he’d be _there_ , and Remus would feel it too, for as long as it took him to come inside the arse of the bloke through whose body flitted the spirit of his dead soulmate. It was _Sirius_ , there in the torn cry that came from Tonks’s voice as the orgasm tore through the body that wasn’t quite hers, Remus’s tears falling on the back of her neck as he shuddered through his own climax and then sobbed, Tonks in his arms once more and Sirius still gone.

Terrible and beautiful, those nights, and each time they promised themselves they would not do it again. But they always did, until one morning when Tonks woke up female after. Nothing unusual about that. She did shift back and forth in her dreams sometimes, she knew that now. She’d got up and gone to shower. And wanted a wank before work to feel like herself again, and not like Sirius. She’d wanted a wank as her own bloke self, just quick under the water.

But couldn’t morph. Stayed a she, solidly so. And all at once, with a rush of instinctive fear, she knew the reason. And it pulled her down until she was a huddled ball of panic on the shower’s tiled floor.

 _Oh please no_ , she thought. _Oh, no. Not now._

Not when outside her, Sirius was dead and Remus was a ghost and the war they were losing was everywhere.

Did it happen because she’d shifted back to female too soon after he’d fucked her? Or had it happened a different time, when she’d been a woman, was Remus’s spell work not careful enough? Or was it some other way, the conditions of metamorphmagus pregnancy being just one more thing about morphers that no one really understood?

Remus did not take it well. Nor did he take it badly. He took it like a stone, his face closing like a book he was finished reading. He said the right things, but it was as if he were reciting them.

And yet they’d agreed: they should get married. There was a war on—if Tonks were killed after the baby was born and they weren’t married, Remus wouldn’t stand a chance of getting custody. And if they were married, he’d be able to inherit her pension from the Ministry, and he and the baby would need every knut.

And if Remus were killed?

“It would be easier for the baby,” he’d said, so matter-of-factly that it frightened her more than a bout of obvious self-loathing would have done.

She leaned across the breakfast table and seized him by the collar of his shirt. “Take that back,” she said. “Don’t ever say that. And don’t you _dare_ get yourself killed. Promise me.”

“There’s a war on,” he said mildly. “I can’t possibly promise that. And you know it.”

That was the week the Ministry distributed two vials to every Auror, for concealment in the lining of their robes. One of Veritaserum, approved for use in the field, even on another auror, because they were being so badly infiltrated by that point. The other was a vial of Sal Mortis, authorized for Aurors to use on themselves only, in the event of a capture by Death Eaters, if suicide became the preferable alternative. After the conversation in the kitchen that day, she knew she wouldn’t mention the vials to Remus. She was afraid he might take the Sal Mortis.

As it was, he seemed to be trying to do it the other way, the coward’s way. He drank too much, took stupid risks among the werewolves, fought with everyone in the Order and stopped coming home. Her belly swelled and she watched him like someone watching a ship disappear over the horizon. There was no way she could swim after it. And when the news came that her father had been killed, she moved back home to mourn with Andromeda.

But then Teddy was born. Remus came shamefaced to St. Mungo’s and took the baby in his arms for the first time, and Tonks watched as his haggard features melted into happiness. It was almost as if he were morphing, the change was so dramatic. She had forgotten what Remus looked like when he was happy.

When he raised his head, there were tears on his cheeks.

“We made a person,” he said. He looked like someone who’d just been awakened from a long and troubling dream. “You and me.”

“Yes.”

“He looks like us.”

“Yes,” she said again. In fact the baby looked exactly like Remus, save for his silky shock of hair, which in the hours since his birth had gone from black to turquoise.

They’d made a person, she and Remus, and he’d missed it. Was she going to tell him now that he couldn’t come home, that his punishment should be that he miss even more? Miss the only happy thing in the world since Sirius’s death?

“Yes,” she said a third time, to the question on his face that he hadn’t asked aloud. “Of course you can come home with us.”

~

They hadn’t counted on the screaming, though. The healers said it was colic, but Andromeda was of the opinion that it was something to do with being a metamorphmagus.

“You screamed for eight months straight,” she said to Tonks. “Why do you think you were an only child?”

Her mother could be right, Tonks reflected; no one at St. Mungo’s seemed to be able to offer any advice about metamorphmagus babies that was not immediately contradicted by someone else. The only thing the healers agreed on was the utterly useless exhortation that one shouldn’t keep pets around a metamorphmagus infant. Too much exposure to other species might confuse the baby’s developing brain, the theory went; the infant might, Merlin forbid, feel more at home in a body not fully human.

“Like mine,” Remus had said when she mentioned it.

“Well, it’s all nonsense anyway,” Tonks answered quickly, before Remus could get going again on his fears of Teddy being infected. “The healers can’t even explain why Teddy’s hair’s blue. No one at St. Mungo’s has even _met_ another morpher besides me.” 

Tonks shifts lower on the couch, watching the last edge of the full moon disappear below the roof of a brick building. Teddy’s sobs have finally subsided into injured snuffles. Now that he’s worn himself out, his hair has shifted from violent electric blue back to its usual pale turquoise. She offers him her breast again, and this time he latches on at once. Finally, the hard knots in her breasts loosen as her milk lets down. She nurses Teddy and watches the sky lighten and thinks of Fleur’s daughter, a little witch whose veela DNA will confer nothing but good fortune upon her. Little Victoire, who, according to Molly, began sleeping through the night at eight weeks old.

She thinks of Fleur, of Fleur’s nipples in her mouth, as if those thoughts could pacify her now. But they’re more like the pacifier Teddy won’t take—a poor substitute. Once she had slipped the rubber bulb into her mouth to see for herself. It was slimy, too squishy: nothing like a real breast. No wonder Teddy refused it. Good for him.

Fleur is happy, Tonks supposes. In her perfect cottage by the sea. With her perfect not-really-a-werewolf husband. With her perfect daughter, who sleeps straight through every fucking night.

When, Tonks wonders, did I become such an angry person? She was never like this before. If anything, she had always had the opposite problem—she loves so fast and so fully that sometimes when she’s around the people she cares about, her heart hurts all the time.

She wonders what it would be like to fuck someone else again, someone who didn’t secretly want her to regain her morphing skills so she would look like his dead partner. If she accused Remus of this, he’d deny it. It’s possible he would even believe his denial was the truth. She doesn’t know any more. She wonders what it would be like to make love to someone for whom grief was not so well-lodged in his heart that even a beautiful baby, this baby, could not budge it. A few nights ago, Remus had been walking the shrieking Teddy when suddenly Teddy’s hair turned black. They both saw it. His eyes were so screwed up from crying that she couldn’t see if they were grey, but she didn’t need to.

“You’re thinking about him,” she said to Remus, raising her voice to be heard over Teddy’s wails. “He feels it.”

She saw several half-formed thoughts cross Remus’s face like speeding clouds. Deny it, ignore it, play dumb.

“I’m always thinking about him,” he said finally. “You know that.”

Which was true enough. She did know it. No reason to point it out.

But she knows too that the loss of Sirius, enormous as it is, is but one part of what is wrong between her and Remus now.

Tonks looks down at Teddy, his tiny hand patting her chest while he nurses. Feeling her gaze, he looks up at her adoringly, his hazel eyes morphing into blue to match her own. No trace of the child who has been shrieking bloody murder for the last three hours.

When he is not screaming, Tonks loves him so deeply that the word ‘love’ seems entirely inadequate. She would do anything for him. And yet, even in her knackered state, Tonks is also aware that this simple routine of caring for a colicky—or perhaps simply metamorphmagus—baby while being unemployed is proving too much for her. That neither she nor Remus can keep on like this. They need help; she knows that.

If they weren’t so strapped for cash, they could hire someone—a young witch or wizard maybe, perhaps someone who had Remus for a teacher back then, who wouldn’t be afraid to come work for them. Even now, even with the Order of Merlin, no one will hire Remus. Or no—that’s not entirely true. Kingsley has offered to get him work as an Unspeakable, but Remus would rather be on the streets than ever work for the Ministry, and Tonks doesn’t blame him. Not after the Registry.

Besides, he’s been asked to write a history of werewolves in Britain, by a press that publishes edgy books— works written by Goblins, arguments against the International Statute of Secrecy, and so forth—and he goes every day to a cheap cafe a few streets over and works on it, wizarding books spread out over the table beneath a disillusionment charm. He’ll get the second half of the advance when the manuscript’s delivered, a pittance that will last them exactly a month. She knows this because that was how long it took them to spend the first half of the advance ten weeks ago.

Asking her mother to help with Teddy is out of the question. Since her father’s death, her mother has been drinking too much, has taken to leaving cigarettes burning on precariously perched ashtrays while she falls asleep in front of Ted’s old Muggle telly. Besides, whether because of the drinking or because Ted is gone, Andromeda’s prejudice against Remus has come forward again. There is no way she can watch Teddy.

Molly would do it in a heartbeat, but apparently Tonks is not quite exhausted enough—or perhaps she’s too exhausted—to bear Molly’s kindly intrusiveness; to invite the maternal competence that makes Tonks feel so clumsy; and worst of all, to feel herself disappearing under Molly’s kindly gaze. Molly who looks at Tonks and Remus and sees just another case of struggling newlyweds. Tonks feels utterly defenseless when Molly looks at her, clucking and smiling; she feels as if she’s dissolving, vanishing like a stain under one of Molly’s _Scourgifys_.

The moon has set; outside the sitting room window the London sky is grey, a polluted brown streak on the horizon signaling the first intimations of sunrise. In an hour or so she’ll make Remus two chops, which is what he always eats for breakfast the morning after a full moon. She wishes they had money for a steak. Sirius used to buy steak for him to eat the morning after transformation.

But money be damned, she is going to insist on one thing. She’ll wait until he’s eaten, and then she’ll tell him. 

They need someone to help with the baby, and to hell with the expense.


	2. You've Done This Before

At five past four on Thursday, the doorbell rings. Tonks buzzes Ginny in and goes out to the corridor and leans over the railing to watch her climb the five flights of stairs, her red hair rising like a flame in the dim fluorescence of the stairwell.

She hasn’t had a real conversation with Ginny in over a year. The last time they saw each other was at the Battle of Hogwarts, but Tonks doesn’t remember that very well. She’s been told she kept fighting after the first spell hit her, but she can’t clearly recall the burning castle, or being trapped between two rows of Death Eaters. She has nightmares about smoke though, about burning, and about having left Teddy behind. She doesn’t remember the heavily-sedated days in St. Mungo’s either, or Teddy being brought to her to nurse by Molly, to whom she knows she should be more grateful. Nor does she remember a heavily-bandaged Remus taking over once the healers let him out of bed.

“Tonks?” Ginny says, and Tonks realizes she’s been staring at nothing, or maybe she’s been staring at Ginny without seeing her. And here Ginny is, her face shiny from the climb. Standing on the top step, her hair loose over the shoulders of a sleeveless white Oxford whose collar is just beginning to fray. 

Tonks reaches out and gives Ginny a hug, acutely conscious of the baby spit-up on the shoulder of her tee shirt, her no-longer-pink hair, her dirty bare feet. “Come in,” she says. “I’m sorry about all the stairs. We couldn’t quite swing any place connected to the Floo Network.”

“You’re apologizing to _me_ for being hard up?” Ginny asks. She wipes her forehead, tucking her loose hair behind her ears.

“I guess I was. Sorry. Once I’ve gone back to work, we’ll be able to afford something a bit nicer, of course, and—”

Ginny lays a hand on her arm. “So you don’t actually need to keep on with the apology, then.”

And Ginny is smiling, surely teasing a bit, but Tonks feels her eyes well up with tears. She turns away, under pretence of leading Ginny to the couch, but the sitting room is so small that all she can really do is plunk herself down on it, and keep her eyes down so that Ginny won’t see she’s crying.

Ginny sits down beside her, and when Tonks doesn’t look up, Ginny rummages in her bag, pulls out a rumpled but clean tissue.

“Tonks. What’s wrong?”

Tonks blows her nose and wipes ineffectually at her eyes. “I’m just tired,” she whispers, trying to breathe normally, willing the tears to stop coming out of her eyes so she can look up. “I’m really really really fucking tired.”

“Poor new mummy.” Ginny puts her hand on Tonks’s shoulder a moment, half soothing, half stabilizing. “Molly mentioned he’s not much of a sleeper. Where is the Teddy boy, then?”

Tonks wipes her eyes once more and looks up, managing a weak grin. “He’s asleep, actually. In the bedroom. But he should wake any minute. And I thought for today you could just hold him, carry him around a bit while I’m here. So he gets to know you.”

Ginny nods, leaning back on the sofa and surveying the small sitting room. “And where’s your other boy keeping himself?” she asks.

“My other boy?”

Ginny’s mouth quirks into a sharp smile. “Your husband.”

For a split second Tonks doesn’t process who Ginny means. It is still completely bizarre to her that Remus has become this entity called “husband.” The only thing odder is when she hears herself referred to as Remus’s wife.

“Remus,” she says aloud, as if saying his name will restore an accurate label to him. _Remus_ is Teddy’s father. And her partner, her friend, her flatmate. Remus is a person she loves, and someone she used to have sex with sometimes.

Ginny is looking at her strangely, her eyebrows creased into the tiniest frown. Tonks tries to shake herself back to some semblance of a functional adult. Someone who can make small talk with a casual friend without seeming completely unhinged. She takes a deep breath and focuses on Ginny’s brown eyes. 

“Remus is working,” she says. “Tonight’s his night to stay awake with Teddy, so he’s got to get a lot done today since tomorrow he’ll be useless. Last night was my night, and you can see the result.”

Ginny nods absently, and Tonks realizes the exigencies of domestic life must hardly register for Ginny. Not the trials of Tonks and her little little life. Not after what Ginny went through last year at Hogwarts.

She knows she should get up, show Ginny where the nappies are, and how to warm the bottles of pumped breastmilk without overheating them. She should wake Teddy and get the three of them down the five flights of stairs and up the street to the crummy playground where they will push Teddy on the one not-broken swing and Teddy and Ginny will bond. Instead, Tonks finds herself leaning back on the sofa and looking at Ginny as if Ginny were a television program—all light and flicker and blessed escape. She needs some escape—just for a few minutes, even.

“Ginny,” Tonks says, groping for some way to postpone the inevitable. “The last time I saw you properly was at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.”

“And you want to know what I’ve been up to since then?” Ginny smiles when she says it, but her eyes are hard, sharp in a way Tonks doesn’t remember. War eyes, that’s what they are. Ginny has changed. They’ve all changed.

“What you’ve been up to since summer began,” Tonks says quickly. “You know. Since it ended.”

Ginny leans back on the sofa with a long exhale, tips her head back and regards Tonks from under her lashes, very still. One breath, another. Ginny is deciding something. Then she says, in a tone that almost succeeds at sounding casual, “I’ve been scouted.”

Tonks has been a Quidditch fan all her life, and yet the meaning of Ginny’s words takes a moment to reach her. When it does, she feels Ginny’s restrained excitement flare inside her own body, just there, below her navel. 

“That’s brilliant, Ginny! By what team?”

Ginny’s face loses the battle of coolness. She breaks into a broad grin, looking like a first-year who’s just been chosen by a wand. 

“Holyhead.”

“But that’s fucking fantastic! Well done!”

“I thought so, too,” Ginny says, and the hard look is back. “That makes two of us, then.”

“But surely your family—”

Ginny clicks her tongue. “Mum and Dad are proud I _got_ scouted, sure, but they think it’s a waste of money for me to pay a week’s lodging in Wales. ‘When there’s no chance I’ll be drafted,’ as Mum put it.”

“But surely there’s some chance, or you wouldn’t have been asked?” 

Ginny shrugs. “And then Ron did a half-arsed job pretending to be happy for me, but of course he’s jealous; Bill sent me an Owl with a picture of Victoire, with ‘congrats on the scouting’ scribbled at the bottom; Percy is probably the only wizard in England who doesn’t follow Quidditch—he sort of slapped me on the back; I didn’t tell George, because—you know. He’s got enough on his plate; and Charlie—well, Charlie _was_ pretty properly chuffed. He fire-called me as soon as he found out, and sang a song he’d made up—about me ‘handling the Quaffle in ways that aren’t lawful.’ So I guess there are three of us.”

“Well, I’m really happy for you,” Tonks says, and as the words come out she realizes how strangely foreign the feeling is. It sends a flood of energy through her exhausted body, right through her arms and down her fingers, so that she’s reaching out across the ugly green couch to wrap Ginny in a hug. Ginny’s arms come back, wiry and tight. Ginny’s hair smells of wind and sunlight, and Tonks realizes she must have been flying today. Alone, on a broom, so fast, and maybe they could go flying together sometime, it would help her get back in shape for work, maybe, maybe Ginny—Ginny has let go of her. Tonks lets go as well, and sits back feeling oddly embarrassed, as if she’s just knocked something over, although she hasn’t. Her fingertips are tingling, her toes are tingling. And that’s not unusual in itself, except it hasn’t happened in forever. Since before she got pregnant. Since before she stopped morphing. Could she possibly be—

“I’m borrowing Harry’s broom,” Ginny is saying, “so that’s one point in my favor. When they scouted me I was on a Comet 360, so a Firebolt can only help matters.”

“You’re back with Harry, then?”

“God, no. We’re back to friendly. I don’t much like being someone’s girlfriend, I’ve realized.”

“Not anyone’s girlfriend?”

Ginny sucks her teeth and grins. “Seems not. I like the sex all right. But not the other stuff.”

“And what’s the other stuff,” Tonks asks, “the lurve?” But even as she says it, teasing, she feels what the other stuff is: it’s a hand around her throat. Squeezing. It’s this horrible green slipcover, this tiny flat. It’s this person called _wife_ who has taken up residence in her body. And the person called _husband_ , whom she shares a bed with but has scarcely fucked in months.

“I wouldn’t know,” Ginny says. “I don’t go for the lurve part. It’s—” She looks down at her fingers, and Tonks follows her gaze to blunt fingernails with a thin crescent of dirt beneath each one. “They’re all just such _boys_ ,” Ginny finishes.

“Have you tried girls, then?” Tonks asks, as a joke or maybe a reminder to both of them that she’s more than this knackered young mother in a manky flat in Whitechapel.

Ginny’s hard eyes are suddenly bright. “I have, actually,” she says.

And fuck, Ginny looks at her. With those dark eyes too old for the rest of her face. Ginny looks at her and keeps looking until it’s unmistakable. Until even Tonks can’t mistake it. Until the hand that was squeezing her throat loosens and slides one electric finger down her chest, all the way to her cunt.

“And?” she manages, though it comes out sounding like a two-syllable word.

Ginny leans forward in one smooth motion and presses her nose to Tonks’s cheek, just in front of her ear. Ginny’s mouth exhales just below Tonks’s jaw, and the warmth spills across the tight ache in her throat, across everything in the world that she’s holding in.

“And it went something like this,” Ginny murmurs, and kisses Tonks on the neck. Holds her mouth there. And then kisses again.

And Tonks, so knackered and lost, so far from who she used to be, is all at once alive again and turning her head toward Ginny’s mouth, and then that mouth is—oh.

Oh, God.

It’s like _this_ to kiss a girl again.

It’s burning through softness. It’s melting metal. It’s girl sweat and salt on Ginny’s soft (so soft!) upper lip. It’s Ginny’s small freckled arms, strong as steel cables around Tonks’s back, hauling her in. It’s Ginny’s tongue liquid in the furnace that Tonks suddenly is, coals glowing bright as Ginny’s red hair. Tonks illuminated from the inside as her magic strokes her everywhere, a thousand wand tips scoring her body like music, her magic bursting out like a too-hasty spell, leaving every nerve in her body singing and burning as she pulls Ginny toward her.

Ginny lifts her freckled leg (cutoff dungaree shorts, bare freckled thighs) and slides into a straddle on Tonks’s lap. The weight of her (small, hard, insistent) suddenly its own unit of measurement: a Ginny-weight, pushing down against the tops of Tonks’s thighs, pushing _against_ her, (mouth mouth mouth), Ginny in her lap, Ginny’s hand in Tonks’s hair, and her own hand tracking the hem of Ginny’s tee shirt, her knuckles brushing the sweet swell of Ginny’s belly.

Ginny moans in her mouth as Tonks glides her hand up under Ginny’s shirt, up her sweet hard ribs swathed in soft girl-skin, and ah—the small mounds of her bare breasts. Small as unripe fruit in Tonks’s hands, but her nipples are fucking huge. Huge and hard, amidst so much softness. Ripe cherries on cake. It is intoxicating. 

Tonks rolls one ripe nipple between her fingers and Ginny moans, breaking the kiss and arching back, yanking her tee shirt up, baring herself for Tonks. Ginny’s nipples are the dark rose color of her mouth, erect and swollen. Tonks feels slightly dizzy as she pitches forward, her mouth closing around that nipple, sweet as a grape. The hard wet nub between her teeth, Ginny’s dark moan in her hair as she thrusts toward Tonks. _Tonks_. Tonks feels her own name rising up inside her like her magic. As if she’d forgotten it.

And _this_ is Tonks, this feeling—Ginny’s hands hard in her hair, Ginny bucking up in her lap. Tonks slides her palms up the back of Ginny’s shirt, her back all muscle beneath the skin, the hard spread of her pecs, then down to the in-curve at the waist. She’s a girl, she feels like a girl. She’s a feast and Tonks has been starving. The sweet roll of just a bit of fat at her belly, the hard sweet sharp of her hip bones and the small spread of her arse pressing down into Tonks’s thighs. And now Ginny’s on her back on the couch and Tonks is on all fours above her, and Ginny is unzipping her flies, her freckled hand sliding the metal zip down, her fingers reaching out to take Tonks’s hand, bring it toward her belly, which is not freckled but pale cream save for a line of gold red hair below her navel, each hair begging Tonks’s tongue to lick it, make it stand on end. Ginny is squeezing Tonks’s hand in her own, Ginny Weasley is doing this.

With superhuman effort, Tonks pushes Ginny’s hand to the side, grabs her bare narrow wrists and pins her hands to the sofa, arresting the unzipping.

Because Tonks is a grown up. A mother. A wife, even. A person not supposed to be doing this with Ginny fucking Weasley, who is barely what, eighteen? and who is the sodding _babysitter_.

“Take my knickers off,” the babysitter pants, face flushed to high color, breathing fast through her mouth.

“Ginny—”

But whatever Tonks imagined she was going to say is lost in the flood of her cunt, in the sureness of feeling her own name, in her own voice again. Was she going to say, _Are you sure?_ Because Ginny, biting her lip, her wrists straining to get her hands free so she can wriggle out of her cutoffs, seems pretty fucking sure.

“You’ve done this before,” is what Tonks ends up saying.

Ginny shakes one trapped wrist free of Tonks’s grasp, reaches up to pull Tonks’s head down close to her own.

“What was your first clue?” Ginny hisses, words as sharp as her teeth in the soft flesh of Tonks’s earlobe. And then, soft in Tonks’s ear, “Yes, I’ve done it before, and now I want to do it again. With you. Before your kid wakes up, so get on.”

Tonks does, letting herself drop until her own heavy breasts are pressed against Ginny’s small ones, and her pubic bone is against Ginny’s, striking against her like flint, each thrust breaking another spark from their bodies. Strike, strike, strike—her clit sparking bright and hard in her jeans and her whole body hungry for Ginny’s skin. Ginny’s soft hot mouth giving way under her tongue, Ginny’s teeth sharp in her lower lip, holding her, pulling her closer. Strike, strike, their hips banging, and then their hands are working together to wriggle Ginny free of her jeans. They end up bunched at her knees. Tonks draws back to see her knickers, light blue and edged with lace that is ripped in a couple of places along the top.

“Spread,” Tonks instructs, and Ginny widens her legs as much as the span of her denims allows, which is not very much, but enough for Tonks to see the dark soak at the crotch of her underwear. She sucks in her breath. She can smell Ginny now, smell the heat of her cunt like the scent of the trees outside that sometimes wafts in on a breeze. Salty fresh, and something hungry in it, spicy, and goddamn it if her mouth isn’t watering along with her cunt. Her body has turned into a series of mouths, even her hands are mouths, and she needs to taste all of Ginny. She sucks Ginny’s lips again, thumbing her nipples until Ginny’s bucking off the sofa and Tonks has to reach down and pull Ginny’s hand away from her knickers because she wants to be the one to do it first.

She sits up and runs her finger down the front of the blue cotton, feeling Ginny’s coarse curls rough through the fabric. Then the swell of her lips in the damp. Tonks traces two fingers, watching as Ginny’s face crumples into a moan. Fuck, yes. The feel of her swelling wet through the thin material. The bump of her lips, still furled but leaking while her clit waits hidden in the folds of its hood. Tonks presses there and Ginny cants her hips hard, groaning, _Do it_ and Tonks can’t wait any more. She scoots backwards between Ginny’s legs until her arse hits the arm of the sofa and her head is level with Ginny’s knickers.

She hooks her finger inside the blue seam that circles Ginny’s inner thigh. Pulls the material to the side.

And oh. There. Not dark rose like her nipples or her mouth. A deep brown-purple, swollen. Wet. With one hand she holds the fabric free so she can look, while with the index finger of her other hand, she reaches forward. To the fire-colored curls at Ginny’s mons. To the folds of her clithood. Tonks touches a finger to her there and Ginny cries out, thrusting up. Tonks’s finger rides out the motion, just there.

“Hold still,” she instructs, yanking Ginny’s knickers down completely. Ginny whimpers but complies, hips barely twitching.

Tonks reaches up and squeezes one of those fat ripe nipples in approval, and with the other hand, skims the pads of her finger the length of Ginny’s still-closed cunt.

“Touch me,” Ginny moans, her hips bucking just a bit before she can still them again.

“You want it?” Tonks asks, her whole body thrumming because it is so good. It is so good to want like this. To want and then have. To take when it’s given. Like this. She drags her fingers slow over the outer folds. Not parting her, not yet. She turns her fingers, watching herself do it. She can almost taste. And she will taste. But first a finger. Turning now. Just the tip. Fuck, she’s so wet, so slick. The wet of her, the breath of it, Ginny breathing hard above her.

Tip in.

Ginny cries out long and sweet as Tonks’s finger breaches her, just as the whip-crack of Apparition caroms around the room.

And then Remus is there, holding his battered valise and staring down at Tonks, on her knees on the sofa between Ginny’s legs. 

Ginny screams, throwing her face over her hands as if deflecting a spell. Remus remains frozen, white-faced. From the bedroom, Teddy begins to wail.

Tonks buries her face in her hands for the briefest of seconds. Hello, darkness. Hello, Remus. Hello, my life.

“Fucking Slytherin _fuck_ ,” Ginny mutters, kicking at Tonks and yanking up her knickers. “Let me _up_.” Her wand’s in her hand now, and she throws out her arm as if to Apparate, cutoffs still undone, not even fully standing. Tonks and Remus both reach out instinctively and catch her arm.

“Let me go,” Ginny yowls, trying to shake them off. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just let me _go_ —”

“You’ll splinch,” Remus and Tonks both say at once.

Their eyes meet briefly over the top of Ginny’s head, a flicker of dry appreciation ghosting over Remus's face in acknowledgment of their unexpected alignment.

“Ginny, just wait—it’s all right, just wait, don’t go, it’s all right,” Tonks babbles over the sound of Teddy’s wails.

“I’ll see to Teddy, then,” Remus says, and turning on the worn sole of his shoe, he escapes down the hall. Teddy’s shriek intensifies when Remus opens the bedroom door, then muffles as he closes it firmly behind him.

“Fucking _fucking_ hell,” Ginny growls, collapsing back onto the couch.

Tonks drops down beside her. “We haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, though she can hear the uncertainty in her voice.

“I need a fucking cigarette.” Ginny loops the toe of her trainer through the strap of her purse and drags it toward her. “I wasn’t planning to smoke in front of you--Teddy and all. But under the circumstances.”

She fumbles in her bag and comes up with a slightly bent cigarette, at which she mutters an Incendio. She has the grace to turn away from Tonks before exhaling, but the room is instantly filled with the smell of it anyway, a sharp sweetness that makes Tonks’s throat tighten for some reason that is bigger than the smoke itself. Something in her is hurting and flayed in response, something in her is crying _No, no, no_. The battle, maybe. It is an effort not to jump off the sofa, not to go to the window and breathe in the street instead, not to say aloud: _No_.

“All right,” Ginny says, after another drag. “So what the fuck is the story with you and Remus? Are you married, or aren’t you?”

 _No, no,_ Tonks is still thinking. Aloud she says, “What?” She replays the sounds of Ginny’s question in her head. “ _Yes_ , we’re married. But not everybody has a marriage like your parents, you know.”

“Obviously not,” says Ginny dryly. “But are you two together? Like, actually together? Or are you still a dyke and Remus is still gay and you’re just doing this little charade or whatever it is because you wanted a baby? Or what? Help me out here.”

“I’m queer,” Tonks says, but the word doesn’t come out right because it gets caught on a sob. “I’m queer, and so is Remus, and we fuck, if that’s what you’re asking” — _Or used to_ , a voice inside her whispers meanly— “and we love each other, and we’re still queer. Why is that so hard to believe?”

And why can she not stop crying again?

“So you two have an ‘understanding,’ then?”

“About this?” Tonks waves her hand ineffectually in the air between herself and Ginny. “We—we never talked about it,” she whispers.

“So officially then, I’m here in the role of homewrecker.”

“No. It’s not like that.” _Because our home’s already wrecked,_ the mean voice says.

Ginny stubs out her cigarette and picks up her wand. “I’ll see you later, Tonks.”

“Ginny, what exactly have I done to piss you off?”

“Oh, nothing.” The hardness in Ginny’s eyes has spread to her whole face. “Just shoving me into the middle of your little domestic drama with your husband, who clearly didn’t expect to come home and find his wife shagging his former student.”

“I didn’t shove you anywhere, Ginny,” Tonks says, hard back. “And if you’re so concerned about my ‘husband’, as you insist on calling him, why didn’t you ask me what the deal was before you climbed into my lap?”

“Because I wasn’t bloody _thinking_ about your husband, was I,” Ginny spits. “Not until he cracked in here while we were fucking and scared the living shit out of me. And besides, _you_ don’t even know what the deal is between you two, you just said so yourself.”

And the truth of that hurts, but Tonks is not going to be bullied by Ginny’s temper tantrum, not when it was Ginny who started this. And not when she can feel that the heat of this argument is not the only heat between them.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Remus,” Tonks says in what she hopes is a calm voice. “Stop acting like a teenager.”

“I am a fucking teenager, Tonks. I’m bloody seventeen years old.”

 _Merlin_. Ginny is practically a child. A child who’s been a soldier and a prisoner and Voldemort’s plaything. Technically of age, but still...what was she thinking?

“You’re seventeen,” Tonks repeats weakly.

Ginny scowls at her shoe.

“It’s my birthday next week. Mum’s having a party for me at the Burrow. You’ll be getting an invitation any day now, I’m sure. Perhaps I’ll see you and your _husband_ there.”

And with that, Ginny tosses her hair back from her face and storms out of the flat, slamming the door hard behind her. 

Tonks stands in the sitting room a moment, feeling slightly stunned.

One thing is brilliantly clear, though. She and Remus need to talk.

He’s lying shirtless on the bed, holding a naked Teddy upright on his chest. A Teddy who--at the moment anyway--is not screaming. At least there’s that.

“We’re out of nappies,” Remus says when she comes in. “And Teddy has just peed all over my last marginally clean, in-an-end-of-the-day-sort-of-way, shirt. I’ve transfigured that tea towel there into a nappy, but I’m not sure my Impervious charm is up to the—”

“Stop it,” she says.

Shadows of unreadable something flit across Remus’s face. 

“Stop the ‘I’m pretending everything is fine’ routine,” Tonks continues. “I can’t. Not another minute.”

As soon as she says it she realizes how true it is, and her whole body sags with the realization. This is why she is so exhausted. Not from lack of sleep. From surfeit of charade. 

Remus shifts Teddy and holds him against his chest.

 _Like a shield_ , Tonks can’t help thinking. Though she’s not sure why Remus looks so defensive when she’s the one who’s just been caught fucking someone else on their sofa.

He strokes Teddy’s hair. “With Ginny,” he says. “Was it—was she payback? Or would you have anyway?”

Tonks opens her mouth, but before she can say _Payback for what_ , some past-life echo of her Auror training sounds through her, and makes her leave her mouth open on a sigh, as if she were simply sighing all along and not beginning to speak. She stands, hands on hips, as if she is simply waiting—a bit bored, in fact, and therefore sighing—for the man she’s interrogating to continue with his story.

But this man is _Remus_.

This is what they’ve come to. Her throat fills with bitterness, and for a moment she thinks she’s actually going to be sick.

Remus looks down at Teddy, at Teddy’s lovely open face that is still full of the ancient magic that clings to all babies. Teddy looks up at his father and his hair shifts from turquoise to sandy grey. Remus looks back at Tonks, still standing arms akimbo at the foot of the bed. He gazes at her, considering something, and does she imagine that she sees a flash of animal surge up inside him, just for a moment?

Remus blinks at her.

“You don’t know,” he says slowly. “You made a good cover, but I can—the wolf can—smell your confusion. It’s just as well, because you’re right, of course. It can’t go on like this. I—I’ll try to be honest with you.”

“Payback for what?” she asks. The fear she’s been holding back courses through her now, a thin stream of ice water filling her throat, her belly, her gut. “Remus, what have you done?”

He shakes his head, sad and grey and exhausted.

“Nothing too terrible, I don’t think. It’s more the lying about it. Not for any reason, even. That’s not an excuse, just—I’m talking around it. I’m sorry. I will—I need a minute. And maybe a whisky. Is it good with Ginny? Is it—does she make you happy? How long have you been—should I say ‘together’? I’m sorry I interrupted the two of you just now. I didn’t know.”

 _What is happening?_ Tonks wants to yell. _What are you even saying?_

“Accio cheap Muggle Scotch,” Remus says tiredly, and a bottle Tonks hadn’t noticed slides off the crowded bookshelf on Remus’s side of the bed, winging its way into his hand. He reaches for a half-empty water glass on the night table and sloshes a finger of whisky into it.

He takes a long swallow and stretches out his legs, adjusting the baby in his lap so that Teddy is lying on his back on Remus’s thighs. Then he Summons the transfigured nappy from among the tangled bedclothes and spells it around Teddy. Then drinks more Scotch. When he finally begins to speak, he looks not at her but at Teddy, as if it’s his son he’s confessing to.

“I’ve been going to this horrible bar,” he begins. His voice is calm, quiet and a little flat, the way it always gets when he’s upset and pretending not to be. “A Muggle place. Men in business suits, the kind who call themselves ‘straight-acting,’ as the phrase goes. Men who stop in after work for a shot and an anonymous quickie in the loo before heading home to the missus.”

Teddy gives a squawk, and Remus begins playing an absent pat-a-cake with Teddy’s baby feet, touching the tiny heels together as he continues, “It’s very sordid. Not dangerous, just—just sordid. Not in a good way. I keep telling myself I won’t do it again, and then I do. Last month it was just the few days before full moon. And then this month it’s been—” he looks up at her at last. “I’m sorry, Tonks. For not telling you, for not asking if you’d mind.”

And he does look sorry, but there’s something off about it. Either there’s more, and this isn’t all of it, or this isn’t even true, or—

She doesn’t trust him, she realizes. She can’t read him and she doesn’t trust him.

She sits down on the edge of the bed, feeling herself sag along with the mattress, sagging under the weight of this.

“How do you feel?” Remus asks tentatively, and when she doesn’t answer, he says, “Angry, surely? That I didn’t tell you?”

Teddy gives another, more agitated squawk, sounding for all the world like a baby crow that’s fallen out of its nest. Then another _awwk_ , this one ending in a wail. He waves his fists beside his head.

Remus sticks his forefinger in Teddy’s mouth. Teddy’s eyes open wide, and he begins to suck, temporarily pacified.

“How do you feel?” Remus asks again.

How indeed, Tonks wonders. Where is the place inside her where her feelings live, even? Has that disappeared as well?

No. _No_ —her feelings are still there, right there, hot and fragile as precariously-piled logs in a bonfire. She is angry at Remus, yes. But not about the Muggle bar, not really. She’s angry at him for knocking her up, which is a terrible thought because there is Teddy, beloved, priceless Teddy. And yet.

And she is angry at Remus for being unemployed, for having enough pride to refuse to work for the Ministry he despises.

And she’s angry at him for being a werewolf, even, for hiding every fucking thing, for never saying how he feels, for being so fucking calm all the time, for smoothing himself out over and over and over again until there’s nothing left of what she used to feel when she thought “Remus”; nothing but this maddening shell of domesticity and lies.

Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? And somewhere along the way, she has begun to do exactly what Remus has done. She’s crowded her real desires into some shameful back room somewhere, until today when she finds herself fucking a girl eight years her junior, a bloody _teenager_ , and not any teenager, but Ginny bloody Weasley. 

But she can’t tell Remus any of this.

“Tonks? I do want to know.”

She’s not even sure if that’s true or if he’s just deflecting, turning the conversation to her betrayals instead of his.

“I feel like I can’t trust you,” she answers.

Remus gives an involuntary shudder. The tremor envelops him entirely for a second or two; then, slipping his finger from Teddy’s mouth, he crosses his arms tightly over his bare chest as if to hold himself still. 

Teddy begins to cry. 

“He’s hungry,” Tonks says automatically. “Give him here.”

She hikes up her shirt and gets Teddy positioned. She tries to breathe deeply and not scream at the man pretzeled on the bed, at the baby sucking at her nipple, at her own self for being so stuck, so angry, so lost. After a while, Remus unwinds his arms and drinks more Scotch. Tonks just sits there, mummy milk machine. They’re so, so fucked.

She stares off into the space that has become her life. Opposite the wall facing the bed, the door of their clothes cupboard is wedged permanently open by a seemingly endless pile of dirty laundry. Most of the hangers on the clothes bar are empty, their contents having been relegated to the unwashed pile on the floor, but Tonks’s Auror robes are still hanging there gathering dust. And the flasks in the lining are still there—the Sal Mortis and the Veritaserum.

Tonks looks at her watch. It’s just seven now. Teddy’s nightly scream opera usually begins around nine. They could do it. They could do it now.


	3. Veritaserum

“You want us to drop Veritaserum,” Remus says.

“Yeah. Like Muggle acid.” She tries a grin, but her face feels like someone else’s, like the muscles won’t quite do what she’s asking.

“No. I can’t.” Remus shakes his head at his glass of Scotch. “If you want to take it, I’ll listen to whatever you—”

“I want _us_ to take it. Why not?” 

“I’m a werewolf. I don’t know how it will affect me.”

“It’ll make you a truthful werewolf, yeah? It’s not like you’re transformed.”

“ _Tonks._ ”

Remus looks up at her, his face tense with an expression she’s never seen before. Or no, she’s seen it many times, but never on him. Barely concealed panic.

“I’m a very dishonest werewolf,” Remus says, his voice rising. “I don’t know what I’d say. I mean I truly don’t. Most people _know_ what it is they lie about, but it’s not like that for me.” He looks around the room, as if an exit, a new wing of the flat, might suddenly materialize out of the grimy wallpaper. “I’ve managed to make myself into a person I can live with—at least most of the time. But if you can’t live with me—”

“Remus, I’m not asking you to move out, I’m asking you to be honest with me. Merlin, what’s wrong with you?”

His long fingers are opening and closing on his thighs in agitation.

“You’re asking me to be honest with my _self_ ,” he says, folding his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to threaten anything. But Veritaserum is not a good idea.”

“Remus, _this_ is not a good idea!” Tonks waves her free arm around the cluttered bedroom. “We’re miserable! And I—I’m disappearing. This is not a life. It’s a lie, you know it is, and I love you but I need to know what’s true. Not only about you. About me, about us. About everything. Look,” she says desperately. “Forget about the fact that we got married and sleep in the same bed every night and have a son. I’m not saying forget Teddy. I’m saying _under_ all that, you—you’re still my best friend. Can we do this together because we’re friends? That’s all I’m asking.” She feels the tears starting in her eyes, and she hates that they are, because it’s one more piece of evidence that she’s disappearing, that she isn’t herself any more, that she’s turned into some poor unemployed mother who has to beg her husband for small favors. It’s disgusting, really. It makes her want to claw at her own skin. Instead she wipes her tears fiercely with the back of her hand, sets her jaw and waits.

Remus studies her with a look of detachment that makes her feel cold, despite the stuffiness of the bedroom. Then he turns his gaze to Teddy, nursing in her arms.

“I’ll do it on one condition,” he says. “You’ll keep your wand in your hand.”

“Any particular reason for that?”

“I don’t know.” His face is unreadable. “I told you, Tonks. I don’t know. But if I say I want to eat the baby, you should Incarcerous me.”

She tries to smile, sees he isn’t joking, stops.

The dose in the vial is enough to interrogate a man the size of Kingsley Shacklebolt for four hours. Splitting it between herself and Remus ought to give them a bit under two hours, which means they should be able to get through before the screaming begins. Tonks finishes nursing Teddy while Remus makes beans on toast for their tea. They eat quickly. Then Remus puts Teddy in the Muggle bouncy swing he’s charmed to float in what would be the kitchen doorway, if the kitchen were a proper room and not just an extension of the sitting room, the threadbare carpet and crappy furniture giving way to worn lino and appliances. Tonks pours the Veritaserum into two mismatched teaspoons and follows Remus to the couch.

“Cheers then,” she says, raising her spoon at him. They swallow. She finds herself watching Remus to make sure he actually does.

“What’s your name?” Remus says after a moment, the standard first question.

 _My name is Cornelius Fudge_ , she tries to say, the standard joke answer among Aurors during Veritaserum training.

“Nymphadora Tonks” comes out of her mouth instead. She winces. “That was quick. Now you. What’s your name?”

“My name is—” Remus hesitates. “My names. Are. Fuck. I’ve had two different names,” Remus stammers.

 _Maybe Veritaserum takes longer for werewolves_ , Tonks thinks for a split second. And then: _Perhaps he means ‘Moony.’_ But she already knows by the look on his face that that’s not what he means, and that the Veritaserum is working.

“My name now is Remus John Lupin,” he says finally.

“And what was your name before?” she asks. Feeling suddenly cold, though the air in their fourth-floor flat is stuffy and overly warm.

Remus’s mouth works a moment, his tongue pushing against his bottom teeth, his lips pressing together, then opening again. He’s fighting the potion, she knows. She’s seen the same facial movements during interrogations.

“John Lyall,” Remus says stiffly. “They had to change it. Fuck, Tonks. I don’t want to be on this potion.”

“Who had to change your name?” Tonks asks.

“My parents,” Remus says. “Fucking hell. This was a bad idea.”

“It’s all right,” Tonks says, though she doesn’t feel all right. “You can tell me.” It’s the kind of thing she used to say in the field when someone she’d placed under arrest was frightened. Remus is frightened. “It’s all right,” she says again, and hopes it’s true. “Why did your parents change your name?”

“Because of the bite.”

Her Veritaserum training comes flooding back to her then. _The potion compels only the most literal answer possible. Narrow questions elicit narrow answers. However, a question that is so broad in scope that digression and evasion is possible results in wasting valuable time. The skilled Auror words each question with care._

“Tell me about the events that led up to the decision to change your name,” she says.

“You sound like a bloody—they took me to St. Mungo’s first. And of course the healers couldn’t do anything for me. Except tacitly suggest that—Christ, I’m just going to say it, aren’t I?”

The potion does work differently on werewolves, Tonks notes. Most people—fully human people—aren’t able to interject commentary into their confessions.

“It’s all right,” she says again. “Just tell me.”

Remus closes his eyes.

“The healers suggested my parents could take me to Wales the night before a full moon and—and leave me in the forest. It might be kinder, they said, to place me where I’d be accepted for what I was. That was how they put it. The wild packs would find me, and take me in. So it wouldn’t be an abandonment so much as an adoption. For my own good.”

Tonks fights back the urge to interrupt, to comfort him, to unbind him from having to answer further.

_Once a question has been posed, the potion compels its response unless a different question is asked. That question then becomes the binding to which the Veritaserum compels a truthful answer. This method is inefficient and can even yield contradictory information. The skilled Auror waits until the initial question has been answered before moving on to the next. Even in time-sensitive interrogations, patience remains the interrogator’s best friend._

All those hours studying for the exams—it’s all still in her.

“They took me to healers in Vienna and Moscow and Paris,” Remus continues. “No help there either, of course. In Moscow they said there was a camp in Siberia for other wizards who’d been bitten, that they could send me there.” He looks at her then. “A camp, they called it. But—you know. A concentration camp. A prison.”

She looks over at Teddy, swinging in the bouncy swing, his fist halfway in his mouth, his eyes on the tree outside the kitchen window, the one with the crows’ nest in it. _Never,_ she thinks. _No matter what._

Remus follows her gaze.

“My parents did keep me,” he says. “I do give them that. They brought me back to England and built a steel cage inside the potting shed in the back garden. But they must have kept researching, because a few months later, I was taken to see a witch who’d worked at St. Mungo’s many years earlier. She was a very old witch, as I remember, and I think now that perhaps she’d been fired. She hadn’t been a Healer there, but a Seer. From back when they used to keep Seers on staff, in our grandparents’ time.”

Tonks waits. This is possibly her one chance to know this man—her partner, her erstwhile lover, her—all right, then, her husband. Teddy’s father. And she wants the truth from him more than she wants him to be comfortable, she realizes. Or comforted. So she waits. And after a minute, Remus begins to speak again.

“This witch told them she couldn’t cure me, but she could make it so I’d have some protection. She said I’d fight against my lycanthropy my entire life, and that that was dangerous, because if I didn’t accept it, it would kill me. But if we did as she instructed, she could ensure I’d stay in human society, that I wouldn’t have a life that...that turned feral.”

Again, the shudder through his body. The blood seems to have drained from his face. He slumps forward, running his fingers distractedly through his hair.

“She said my name should be changed, from John to—Wolf. Just Wolf. So that I couldn’t pretend to myself I wasn’t one. If I lied to myself about that, she said, I’d convince myself I was fully human, and—I’d wind up killing humans. And then I’d be put to death.”

Tonks reaches out a hand and threads her fingers through his, still tangled in his hair. His hand is icy cold. She brings it down to her lap, and he looks up at her.

“But they wouldn’t call me Wolf. That was too much for them. Instead we took Lupin for our family name—all three of us, so it would seem more normal. My father changed his first name to Lyall, which had been our surname, and my mother changed her first name to Hope. Which was what _she_ needed never to forget, I suppose. And my first name became Remus.” He leans his head back against the wall above the sofa, his ruffled hair sticking up haphazardly against the plaster. “I suppose it was successful enough. I never have lied to myself about what I am. And I’ve never killed a human while I was transformed.” He takes a deep breath. “I guess that’s all. My tongue doesn’t seem to have any more words on it.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

Remus’s eyes flash with sudden anger and she realizes that the Veritaserum has made it impossible for him to lie with his facial expressions as well.

“Well, we’re off to a smashing start, then,” he snaps. “Given that we’ve only just got through ‘what’s your name?’ Next question, Interrogator.”

 _I’m not your interrogator,_ she tries to retort, but the words won’t come out. Because she is an interrogator, isn’t she? _I don’t mean to be your interrogator,_ she tries to say next. But those words don’t come either.

Because she does mean to, she realizes. She wants to. She wants that power back again.

“What were you really doing at the Muggle bar?” she asks.

Remus closes his eyes again.

“Getting sucked off through glory holes.”

Says the man beside her on the couch, his trousers shiny at the knees, the muscles of his bare chest and arms stark and ropy beneath his skin. The terrible rumple of scar tissue at his shoulder, and the fainter deeper scars crisscrossing his chest beneath a patch of silvering hair. This beautiful wolf. With his cock through a hole in a wall, as if his cock were a thing that didn’t belong to his precious body at all.

But is that fair, to judge the act that way? It must be a happy thing for him, she supposes, or at least a release that brings relief. She tries to think of what to say, but her brain feels muffled, stupid. She glances around the room, trying to reorient herself, and realizes that Teddy has fallen asleep in his bouncy swing. Unthinkable, that. Definitely more surprising than Remus having his cock sucked through a hole in a bathroom wall.

“You like it...anonymous like that?” she hears herself ask.

“No,” Remus says. “‘Like’ is not an accurate word.”

She hears Moody’s gravelly voice in her head: _Get control of your subject, Tonks. NOW._

“Remus. Why do you go...why do you keep doing it, then?”

“I want to fuck.” Remus answers at once. “I want to fuck and fuck and fuck and I want to do it hard. And I hate that I want to, and when I’m just through the hole it’s easier to pretend that I don’t. If there’s no one I can see, no one to touch or smell or hold, it doesn’t hurt—as much—because I don’t think—so much—of Sirius. Oh, fucking hell.”

He seems to deflate then, his naked torso slumping over until his head comes to rest on his knees.

Not since before since she got pregnant has Remus spoken Sirius’s name aloud.

And the sorrow of it, yes, but more than that. More than the lump in her throat is the fist in her chest, the fists her hands are making, the power of what’s happening surging through her. He’s telling her the truth. She’s making him tell her the truth. She’s making him.

And it feels—oh, _Merlin_.

It feels like shoving and sex and battle. It feels like loving someone the way she knows she could if only there were a way to let it all out, all the energy coiled inside her. Her fingertips are tingling, the soles of her feet are tingling again. The energy flares wild in her body, up through her cunt, up her spine; and then the hair on her scalp is tingling too, as if she’s some kind of lightning rod during an electrical storm. 

“What else don’t you want me to ask you?” she says.

Remus raises his head, incredulous. “That’s not on. I’m not your—” His mouth trembles, fighting the potion and losing. “I don’t want you to ask about us.”

“What about us?”

“Anything. What we think we’re doing, playing happy families like this. Or unhappy families, as the case may be. What we’re not doing. Why we never fuck anymore. Damn you, Tonks. This isn’t fair.”

And the flare through her body is pure anger.

“Do you think it’s fair that you’re never honest with the person you’re married to?” she demands. “Do you think it’s fair that we’re living hand to mouth because you won’t take the job Kingsley offered you, because you won’t believe the Ministry’s changed? Do you think it’s fair that you wish I would get my morphing back just so you could fuck me again while pretending I’m Sirius?”

Remus presses his knuckles against his mouth. “No,” he mutters. “None of that’s fair. I’m sorry, Tonks.” He looks up at her. “I truly am.”

“Of course you truly are, if you tell me you are, you bloody idiot; you’re on Veritaserum. So why, according to you, don’t we fuck any more?”

“Because you won’t like what I want. Please don’t pursue thi—”

“ _Remus_. Do you not think you owe me some honesty for once in your fucking life? Do you not agree with that? If you truly don’t agree, I’ll stop asking.”

Remus presses his lips together.

“I do owe you that,” he says quietly. “Yes. But you have to let me ask you something too.”

“All right.”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

“Because you’re such a bloody liar!”

“Why else?”

“Because...” And fuck: she realizes what she’s going to say a split second before she says it. Then she says it. “Because I like how it makes me feel.”

Remus’s eyes open slightly wider. “How does it make you feel?” he asks.

“Powerful.” Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“You like having me to heel?”

“Yes—but don’t say it like that.”

“You like having the werewolf at your mercy? Making him do just what you want, _Auror?_ ”

She can’t meet his eyes when she answers.

“Yes.”

“Does it turn you on?” Said with a snarl.

Her mouth fighting her mind, fighting the potion, trying to tuck the answer back and back and back, but she feels it in her cunt, in her belly. In her mouth.

“Yes,” says her mouth, and her eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry, Remus.”

He licks his lips, narrows his eyes.

“Incarcerous me,” he says through gritted teeth. “Now.”

Spread-eagled on the sofa is how it comes out. With his wrists lashed to rings she draws out of the wall, with his ankles in cuffs fastened to rings screwed right through the carpet and into the floor, pulling his legs apart and out toward the center of the room. He’s still sitting, but barely, with his arse on the very edge of the cushion. Remus digs his bare heels into the floor to keep from sliding forwards, pushes himself back, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the wall and finding none.

She stands between his splayed legs, she leans forward and tightens both fists in his hair. Her hands are tingling. Her feet are tingling. The way they used to, back when she could morph.

Remus strains in the bonds, his forearms shaking.

And she’s still sort of crying when she asks, “So you think you need to be tied up around me, werewolf?”

Remus’s mouth moves, the tip of his tongue pressing hard against his upper teeth. But soundless. Then the Veritaserum wins out.

“Yes.”

He won’t look at her.

She pulls his hair.

“You think I’m your fragile wifey? Your son’s delicate mummy?”

“I...not any more. I...I did. I don’t know why.”

“Just like everyone else thinks, yeah? No longer an Auror, no longer queer, no longer a fucking Metamorphmagus, even? Any day now there’ll be a rumor I’ve become a Squib. Is that what you think too?”

She knows she’s asking too fast, that each new question only cancels out the previous one, but she can’t stop herself. She lets go of his hair with one hand and grips his face hard between her thumb and forefinger.

“You want to know why _I_ haven’t wanted to fuck _you,_ Remus? Because it’s not fucking sexy, is it, being treated like this by everybody. And especially you—it’s disgusting, really. It’s like when I was little and Andromeda made me get dressed up in some awful pinafore for the holiday photo. All I wanted was to get out of those clothes, but I was stuck in them, wasn’t I, and it was like—like being polyjuiced against your will, it wasn’t me any more, and I was disappearing in those clothes, and that’s what _this_ has been like, and you—even you!—you think you have to tiptoe around me now, don’t you, and treat me like some bloody china doll. You think you might break me if you’re not careful? You think I can’t handle you anymore, _dark creature?”_

Two spots of color bloom bloom on his cheeks where her fingers are squeezing. His eyes lock on hers.

“You can handle me,” he says, his voice strained.

“Disvesteum,” she mutters, not taking her eyes from his face. Remus’s trousers and pants Vanish, landing with a rustle somewhere behind her. He’s hard, as she knew he would be, his cock arching up toward his hip, the head just peeking out from the foreskin.

She lets go of his face and reaches for his cock, dragging her fingertips briefly down the shaft. The skin feels hot and smooth and _Remus_. He shivers under her touch and she feels a pulse of wetness surge between her legs.

“Tell me how you want us to fuck,” she says. 

He thrusts his face against hers, but not in a kiss.

“The wolf wa—No. _I_ want—” He pulls back, looks at her a little wild-eyed. “Tonks, maybe we shouldn’t—do this.” He presses his lips together, fighting the Veritaserum. She runs a fingernail lightly over his bollocks, waiting, and he turns his face away.

“I want you on all fours,” he says between gritted teeth. “Like a dog. Like a—like a bitch—oh god, Tonks, I’m sorry.” Remus presses his lips together hard, but a second later he’s hissing out a breath and speaking again, the potion urging him on. “I want to slam into you from behind and fuck you so hard you cry. I want to be the alpha, and I can’t, you’d hate it, you’re not—like that, but Sirius was, and he let me, I could always—and now I can’t—”

Remus’s eyes find hers again, his eyes wide and stricken, his face flushed.

“For God’s sake, Tonks, will you gag me or something? I don’t—aargh!” He whips his head sideways. “I want to fuck you and fuck you and own you, all right? I want to bite your neck and—Christ, I want to—don’t listen to me, Tonks—I want to turn you, I want to bite you and turn you and—and _breed_ you again—fuck—because I just want a Pack, it’s the only thing I want, I want Pack again and we aren’t one and we should be and _I can’t fucking stand it_.”

Remus is shaking.

“Look at me,” she commands.

And then it happens.

Her hair changes. She can feel the magic on her scalp like static electricity snapping off a blanket. The crackle of an energy that had been folded away now suddenly shaken out, flaring in the August heat.

Remus lets out a moan.

“Tell me what you see,” she says. “Is my hair pink again?”

Remus shakes his head no, his teeth letting go of his lower lip to speak the words.

“Not pink,” he says. “Silver.”

Like Moody’s was.

Like Fleur’s has always been.

Like Remus’s is becoming.

Like Sirius’s will never be.

Like a wolf’s fur.

“What do you see when you look at me?” Tonks demands.

Remus’s voice comes out a whisper.

“Power.”

Tonks brings her mouth close to his ear and bites down hard on the lobe. Remus’s whole body stiffens in pain and the tiniest cry escapes him, scarcely louder than a breath.

“We’re going to fuck now,” she tells him. Teeth in his ear. Fist in his hair. Denim thigh hard against his erection.

“Yes,” he rasps. “Yes. Now. Yes.”

She fires off two more spells. Remus’s bonds release, only to instantly reform in a collar around his neck. Tonks hooks a finger through the d-ring and drags him forward, down onto his knees on the carpet. A knee to his chest and he’s falling backward, and while he’s off balance she grabs him by the shoulder and flips him hard sideways. He lands on his side and instinctively scrambles up to hands and knees, which is just where she wants him. she throws her weight across his back, saying the spell as she does it. The cuffs on his wrists rebind, eye hooks appearing out of the carpet to accept the spell’s cords. First year Auror stuff. Flying from her magic as if she’d never missed a day of work. She doesn’t even need her wand for this. She can feel it in her fingers.

She grips a fistful of his hair, pulls his head up level with hers.

“You want me like this, on all fours,” she says. Her tongue rough against his ear.

“Yes.”

“You want to collar me? Make me your bitch?” She slips two fingers of her other hand between the leather and the back of his neck.

“Fuck. Yes.”

“What do you do? Do you prep me first? Do you just shove in? Tell me.”

“I just—fuck. I just shove in. But you want it, you’re—you’re whining for it, because it’s Pack, it’s—there’s an order, an order to it, and you want me to take you like that—”

“Like _this_?” And the lubrication spell’s already on her fingers--wordless, almost thoughtless, just _there_. She presses a finger straight into him, pushing the folds of flesh open as she enters, slowly but without pausing. Remus cries out, a long sound that ends in a growl. Not pain.

“You shove inside me like this?” Tonks asks.

“Yes.” He drops onto his elbows on the carpet and buries his face in the thin weave. “Fuck you from behind,” he mumbles. “Like a dog, like a wolf. Like— _fuck_ —” As she pulls back, thrusts her finger in again: “Like Pack.”

She fucks him with two fingers, not gently, and Remus rests his cheek on the carpet and makes a sound that is more like a dog’s whimper than anything else.

A shiver runs through her, a tingling that begins in her toes and fingers and eddies up through her limbs, through her whole body, right up through her silvered head.

And she knows it for what it is: she’s got her morphing all the way back.

“I fuck you harder,” Remus pants. “Not with my fingers. Fuck you with my cock.”

And she could do it now—become a bloke again. For the cock. But that’s not who she needs to be to sort this out. It’s in this body that it has to happen, in this body that bleeds and bears a new human and keeps it alive with the milk from these breasts. This body of hips and openings and so many soft and weighted curves. This body so female she lost sight of what that could mean and do and be, this body so easily reduced to its common denominator, to an equation that seemed to have only one answer, one proof: the baby, the irreducible sum.

But now there’s this, her breasts heavy over Remus’s naked back, her cunt wet in her jeans as she kneels between his spread thighs. Her fingers in his arsehole and Remus with his face in the carpet telling her the truth at last.

The cock fucking, the cock taking. The cock in the hole. She needs that too, there needs to be something for that part too. Anything would do, really.

Including Teddy’s pacifier, lying beside the sofa leg.

She transfigures it.

She transfigures it solid and fat and the length of her hand. She unzips her denims and transfigures the flared base wide until fits right inside her Y-fronts, suctioning just over her clit. She transfigures it hard.

She pulls her fingers out of Remus’s arse and presses the tip of her cock to his slickened hole.

“You just shove it in?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Like _this_ , werewolf?”

All at once. His arse so tight around her shaft, rocking back toward her.

“Yes,” he gasps. “And I hold your hips, I pull you to me. I have to fuck you, have to breed you, have to have Pack again, just Pack, everyone in their place so it’s right.”

His hipbones hard handles to grip, to hold tight as she thrusts into him, her pubic bone hard against his arse cheeks as she drives her cock inside him.

“So it’s right, so the scents, so I can smell when it’s right,” he babbles, the words coming in gasps over her thrusts. “When it’s right all the scents are in order, it goes how I make it go, when I fuck you, the scents, and then I can smell I should bite you—”

The dildo presses all around her clit, but not right on it. Not nearly enough. Tonks throws herself forward over him, her breasts against his back, the cock inside him curving down. Remus arches up, crying out the way he does when she hits his prostrate with her fingers. She pulls back and slams in harder. It has to be hard now, and _now_ she can feel it, the flared base of the cock is lined up right on her clit, her opened jeans slipping further down her thighs and her cock disappearing into his arsehole. But it has to be harder; it has to be _there_ , her clit thrumming with each thrust of her cock so she can feel—

“—Like that,” Remus gasps. “Hard like that, I’m fucking you like that, and you’re whining for it, and the sound, and your scent, they go into me—like my cock going into you, hard, I’m doing it so hard you’re crying. And then—when I’m about to come I—I bite your neck—”

Her orgasm is building inside her now, each thrust coiling tighter behind her clit, all the power concentrating in. Into the place she’s thrusting from. She hooks a finger around the leather collar and tugs, pressing her face against his neck—sweat, salt, sex, _Remus_ —and taking his skin between her teeth.

“Fuck, yes. Like that, Tonks, I get my teeth in your neck, and then I—oh fuck, oh fuck— _I break the skin_ —”

Her body filling Remus, filling the room, radiating outwards until it’s coming apart and reforming like a morph. But it isn’t a morph. It’s the fucking. The coiled spring on the verge of releasing. Her teeth at his neck, her teeth on his shoulder, her teeth biting into the scar left by Greyback, biting there, harder, harder—

Remus screams.

Blood in her mouth, Tonks orgasms.

A shimmer of pure energy, her body transformed. Her magic, filling her again.

There is no spell for morphing. There is only form and possibility, and the magic in the merging of the two.

 _Wolf_ , she thinks, and her forearms, still wrapped around Remus’s chest, sprout silver fur.

And then Remus is coming too, jerking helplessly beneath her. His knees give out and he collapses on the rug, Tonks on top of him.

When she’s caught her breath, she works her arms out from under Remus’s chest, her cock slipping out in the process. Remus turns his head to the side and noses the silver fur between her wrist and elbow. He runs his face back and forth across it, breathing it in. Resting on top of him, Tonks feels small shivers spread up her arm each time Remus swipes his mouth and nose across it. Scenting her, or leaving his scent.

At last he huffs up, shoving her off him. They resettle on their sides, facing each other, still panting. Tonks unbuckles the collar from his neck and inspects the spot she’s bitten. No need to spell it; the blood’s already clotting on its own. Then she Vanishes her jeans, revealing the wolf fur that has appeared on her legs as well. Remus tangles his bare legs into hers, running his calves back and forth against the thicket of silver.

Then he looks at her, a question in his eyes.

“The wolf fur I morphed on purpose,” she says. “But the silver human hair—on my head, and—” she looks down at herself, just to be sure— “and there, too, that just happened. And I think it’s going to stay that way now. I think the pink is gone.”

Remus’s face is doing some kind of transformation of its own, as if a layer of something that has lain over it is dissolving, and beneath it, the muscles beneath the skin are subtly reforming. He looks the same as he always has and he looks absolutely different. Something is gone from his face, something she had thought was a part of him, that wasn’t after all.

Or is she imagining it? It’s grown so dark it’s hard to tell. She casts a charm on the lamp on the end table, and it flicks on, chasing the shadows from the room.

Remus looks like he’s been fucked out of his mind, that’s part of it. He looks—is it relaxed? That too, but something more. His face looks open, that’s what it is. Not hiding.

Oh, the hiding will come back, she knows. When the potion has worn off, which should be any time now. And yet perhaps it will not return so completely. And whether it does or not, that matters less to her now, she realizes. Now that she knows _she_ will not return to her own hiding. Not after this.

She takes his face between her fingers once again, gently this time. Stroking his cheeks, stroking his mouth. They haven’t kissed yet, she realizes. And kisses him. His mouth, smooth and full beneath the stubble of his lower lip. He tastes of toast and cheap Scotch and _Remus_. He tastes of a man she knows. This is a body she knows. His body, she realizes with a start, has always been the most honest part of him.

“Tonks? Would you morph that fur away again now?”

“I—yes. Do you not like it?”

Remus closes his eyes.

“I love it. But it—it scares me how much. I don’t want—I have to go slow with this, all right?”

“All right, then.”

She closes her eyes too, concentrates until she feels the morph magic rush over her, re-forming her again. Then Remus’s hands are on her face, bony and gentle and certain. His fingers on her cheeks, her lips, in her mouth. His eyes are soft, the amber glowing through the hazel like a sunset. Like sun across a meadow. She has never seen him so quiet, so present.

“I’m sorry for not seeing you,” he says softly. “I won’t—” his mouth moves soundlessly, the potion making him rephrase. “I’ll _try_ not to do that again. I promise. But Tonks—this afternoon—” He breaks off, a smile blooming across his face, all the way up to his eyes. “Even before we took the Veritaserum. When I saw you on the couch between Ginny Weasley’s legs—you looked pretty queer to me.”

Her face heats and Remus smiles again. 

“You’re blushing. Tell me why.”

“Because we got caught. And because she’s only seventeen. Eighteen next week.”

“Is that all? She looks rather ancient, doesn’t she? In any case, that would make her eight years younger than you. You’re thirteen years younger than me; a gap, if I remember, that you felt was utterly beneath your notice, did you not?”

The Veritaserum’s beginning to loosen its grasp on him; she can hear it in the way he’s speaking. If he’s anything like most people, there will be a resurgence of the potion’s power over him again, a kind of second wave, before its power wanes completely.

“That’s correct,” she says, still bound to answer the question, rhetorical though it was.

“How does Ginny fuck?” Remus asks. “Ugh, don’t answer that—she was my student. I don’t want to hear—argh. Fuck. I _do_ want to hear about it.” He raises one eyebrow. “Potion’s still working, then.”

“She was such a girl,” Tonks says. The Veritaserum has still got her as well; the words flow right off her tongue. A relief to speak them. “She was so soft, but so hard underneath, and wiry, and she sat on my lap, and first she was very bossy and aggressive—she started it, you know—and then she just _melted._ And she was sort of begging me to do things to her, and then when I touched her clit, she cried out, and I practically came right there. It was fantastic. And then you interrupted.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Remus strokes her cheek. “I want you to have fantastic sex. Even if it’s not with me.”

“That’s—that’s nice of you.”

“I like hearing about it,” Remus says. “It makes me want to hold my cock.” He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.” He drops his hand to his lap, but merely covers himself up.

“I want to hold your cock,” Tonks hears herself say. “Would that be all right?”

Remus takes his hand away from himself again and curls it around the back of her neck. “It would be more than all right,” he answers.

He’s still soft, but his penis stirs slightly in the warmth of her hand. She feels herself stir in response.

“Put your hand on me,” she murmurs. 

He reaches down, his fingers bumping the dildo, which has fallen on the rug between them. He picks it up, depositing it behind them on the coffee table.

“I’d best not transfigure that back to a pacifier,” she says.

Remus laughs. “No, I suppose not. Besides, I suspect we’ll make better use of it in this form.”

His fingers find the swell of her cunt and he shapes his hand around her, fitting her into the cup of his palm.

“When will you see Ginny again?” he asks.

“I don’t know if she wants to see me again ever,” Tonks says, rocking gently against him. “She was pretty angry when she left.”

“Because I walked in on you?”

“Because—because—I’m not sure.” It seems blurry now; distant, though it happened just this afternoon. “I think when she saw what a mess we were, you and me, she didn’t—she didn’t like me so much any more.”

“Then perhaps we should let her know we’ve got it sorted.”

“Have we got it sorted? I mean. We—we need to keep it sorted, yeah? I want to know what you do, Remus. Where you’re going, and who you’re fucking, even if it’s awful. And if I’m jealous, or hurt, I—I’d rather be those things than not trust you, and have you skulking about like a criminal who won’t even meet my eyes. And I want—what you said, I want to have fantastic sex too. With women. With Ginny again, if she’ll have me. When you said it looked pretty queer to you—it was. And that was part of what was fantastic about it. That the person who feels that way is me. I need to feel that. Otherwise, all this” —she nods vaguely at the room around them—“it might take over again.”

Remus presses a finger gently against the folds of her labia. She’s still wet from her orgasm, and his finger slips easily in.

“We won’t let it take over again,” he says. “We can’t.”

Across the room, the bouncy swing creaks. They both look up in time to see Teddy raise his head, his unfocused eyes darting from side to side. Then he arches his whole body backward in the swing and begins shrieking.

“Here we go,” Tonks mutters as Remus clambers to his knees. “Merlin on a flobberworm, why does he scream so much?”

“Because he wants to be a wolf,” Remus blurts, and freezes, halfway to standing. “Oh, God. It’s true, Tonks. I didn’t know I knew it. But it’s true.” He drops onto the sofa. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Tonks scrambles up and goes to lift Teddy out of the swing, yelling to be heard over his screams.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Teddy.” Remus shakes his head. “Christ, this potion.”

“I mean, how do you know? Teddy, Teddy, come on, now.” She sits down beside Remus, offering Teddy her breast, which only makes him scream louder.

Remus’s head is in his hands.

“I’ve known it since—since the first full moon after he was born, I think. I didn’t know I knew it, but I do. What the healers told you about keeping metamorph babies away from animals—it must be true. He screams at night because that’s when the moon’s up. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”

“ _Teddy_.” Tonks lifts him upright again and holds him facing her. “For God’s sake, Teddy, be a wolf if you want to.”

Teddy continues to scream, of course. Tonks feels like an idiot.

“He doesn’t know how,” Remus says. “Don’t you see? He only sees the wolf once a month. But he’s seen me every month, hasn’t he? Last week, when you cast the deafness charm so you could sleep, and he was trapped in the playpen. The wolf was beside him for hours.”

“And the month before that,” Tonks remembers, “you wanted to stay in the bedroom when you transformed. You never want to, except—”

“Except for the month before that one, when I did as well,” Remus finishes. “The first full moon after Teddy was born. I didn’t want to leave him either time. And I was so afraid I’d eat him, even on the wolfsbane, but I couldn’t leave. Because he was Pack.”

“I knew you wouldn’t eat him,” Tonks says, raising her voice to a near yell so Remus can hear her. She scowls at her son. “For Merlin’s sake, Teddy. You’re a Metamorphmagus— _morph_.”

Remus mumbles something inaudible.

“What?” Tonks yells. “Teddy, for God’s sake, love, shut up.”

Remus leans closer to her ear.

“I said, _show him_. Do what you did earlier. With the...with the fur.” He turns his face away from her, but not before she’s seen the flare of hunger on it.

Tonks closes her eyes, feels along the flesh of her human arms. Feels the sense memory of Wolf-Remus’s fur, its density, its sheen. Its oil-blood-wolf-mate smell. Feels _here_. And then it is, the fur springing up along her arms and legs.

She opens her eyes and brings the screaming Teddy face down into the fur that now covers the tops of her thighs.

Teddy gasps, a huge inrush of breath, and falls silent.

Tonks stares at Remus, mouth open. 

Remus buries his face in her other thigh, butting his nose into the fur, his breathing audible.

She lets her hands come to rest on both their naked backs. Teddy makes a huffing sound in his throat that reminds Tonks of a noise Sirius used to make, a guttural expression of pleasure that happened when he was a man, but that always made her think of Padfoot.

Remus nuzzles at her leg.

“Please hold my head still,” he says. “I don’t want to—this is so much, Tonks. It scares me.”

So she presses her hand hard on the back of his skull, holding him firmly against her. He lets out a sigh and his body goes limp.

After a minute she feels her leg growing wet. Remus is crying.

She lets go of his head so he can raise it, thinking it’s happiness she’ll see on his face, or at least relief.

But his face is filled with pain.

“What is it?” she asks.

Remus’s eyes move to his son. A downy fur has appeared across the back of Teddy’s shoulders, silver tipped with brown.

“I don’t want him to be like me,” Remus says miserably. “Anything else, but not that.”

“ _Remus_.” 

Her tone is so sharp that he startles.

“Remus, don’t do what your mum and dad did. If your son’s going to be an animal, don’t pretend he isn’t one.”

Remus wipes at his eyes with the tips of his fingers and doesn’t answer.

“Besides,” Tonks says. “He won’t be like you, not in the ways you’re afraid of. He’s a Metamorphmagus, remember? Not a werewolf. It won’t be anything like it’s been for you. It’ll be like—like it was for Sirius. Think how happy Padfoot made him.”

Remus buries his face in the fur of Tonks’s thigh again. Her thigh grows wet again. She strokes his hair, strokes Teddy’s back. At last Remus turns his face up toward her, his cheek still resting on her leg. He has stopped crying.

“The only thing I want is Pack,” he says. “And I would never admit that if I weren’t on this potion, so I know it’s still working. And while it is, I want to say something, so you’ll believe me.” He presses his nose into the fur once more, as if for sustenance, before he continues.

“Tonks. I know you don’t want what we’ve been pretending we have. You don’t want to be married the way other people do it, and you don’t want all the things that come with it. Everything we’ve been thinking we should do, and being miserable at. And all the expectations, wherever they come from. I don’t want any of that either.” He pauses, his wet eyes suddenly shy. “But I do want us to be Pack. You and me and Teddy. Whatever that means. I don’t even know what it would mean. It doesn’t mean never fucking anyone else, or never loving anyone else, and it doesn’t mean—” he takes a deep, shuddering breath. “It doesn’t mean being the way Sirius and I were. But if we can find some way to do it that doesn’t kill us, I...I do want Pack with you.”

Tonks lets her head sink down until her forehead rests against Remus’s cheekbone, her breasts against Teddy’s back. Teddy sighs contentedly, the sigh of a baby falling asleep, and a moment later, Remus sighs too. Three naked humans on this squishy thing called a sofa. The three of them curled together, animals after all.

 

A scratching at the screened window startles Tonks upright again. It’s an owl, squatting like a pigeon on the narrow ledge.

Remus gets up and raises the screen. The bird flies into the kitchen and perches on the back of a chair, a small scroll tied to its leg. It’s the Weasleys’ owl, Tonks realizes, the tattered one that always looks just a few wing-flaps from death. Remus offers the owl a bit of the toast left over from their tea, a few congealed beans clinging to the bread crust. The owl looks highly affronted, but gobbles the food anyway, then sticks out its leg so Remus can remove the scroll. 

“Is it from Ginny?” Tonks asks, hearing the eagerness in her voice.

Remus’s mouth twitches. “I don’t think so,” he says, eyes scanning the outside of the scroll. “I certainly hope it isn’t, for your sake. Here, see for yourself.”

He passes her the roll of parchment so she can read the address:

 _Mr. and Mrs. Remus J. Lupin_

Tonks bursts out laughing. “Ginny would never be that angry at me,” she says. “Anyhow, that’s Molly’s writing.” She unrolls the scroll and reads it aloud.

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Weasley request the pleasure of your company  
at a birthday celebration in honor of their daughter Ginevra  
Saturday 15 August, 1998, at two o’clock  
The Burrow, Ottery St. Catchpole  
Refreshments will be served  
~

“Sounds more like a wedding invitation,” Remus comments dryly.

“They probably wish it were one.”

“I thought you said she was turning eighteen?”

“She is.”

“Then why all the fuss if she’s already of age? Are you sure she’s that old, cradle-robber?”

“Get stuffed.” Tonks throws the invitation at him, but it flutters to the floor just a few inches in front of her. “If you remember, this time last year birthday celebrations were the farthest thing from anybody’s mind.” 

Remus doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. They’re both remembering the same thing, she knows—Kingsley’s Patronus bounding down into the middle of Fleur and Bill’s wedding celebration to broadcast its terrible message.

The owl, having finished the remains of their supper, hoots once and holds out its leg. Remus comes back into the sitting room, stooping to retrieve the scroll from the floor.

“Shall we both go, then?” he asks. “Or would you rather see Ginny without me?”

Tonks considers.

“I’d rather we both go _and_ I see Ginny without you. You could distract Molly while I corner ‘Ginevra’ in an upstairs bathroom and give her her birthday present.”

“I can do that.” Remus smiles. “I’m sure Molly will find it very distracting when I tell her Teddy’s decided he wants to be a werewolf.”

“I see your Veritaserum’s worn off,” Tonks says.


	4. The Pleasure of Your Company

The motorbike was smashed last summer when they took Harry away from Privet Drive, and Teddy’s too young to side-along Apparate, so they Floo from the Ministry lobby. By the time they arrive in the fireplace at the Burrow, Teddy needs his nappy changed again. Remus carries him off to the loo while Tonks drifts toward the kitchen to wait for them. The party’s in the back garden, and the house is empty of people.

But there’s Harry, standing alone at the bottom of the kitchen stairs. He looks taller than he did three months ago. As if he’s standing straighter, the weight of the world no longer on his shoulders. 

“Wotcher, Teddy’s godfather,” Tonks says, hugging him.

“Wotcher, yourself,” Harry returns. 

When they step back from the hug, his eyes skate over her and she realizes he’s appraising her in the same way she’s just studied him; checking to see how she’s come though the war. She watches him take in her dragonhide leather jacket, her suit trousers, her motorcycle boots. When he returns to her face, he does not quite meet her eyes, his gaze lingering instead on her close-cropped silver hair. 

“All right, then?” Harry says at last.

He still feels responsible, she realizes. For all of them, the living as well as the dead.

“Yeah, mate. I’m good.”

“Your, er, silver. Hair. Looks nice,” Harry stammers.

“Ta. Why aren’t you outside with everyone else?”

“Oh—” Harry looks even more embarrassed. “Just taking a break from being the center of attention for a while. It’s Ginny’s party, after all. Besides, Mr. Weasley wants to show me something. Here he comes.”

“It’s the most fascinating device I’ve discovered this year,” Arthur beams as the screen door bangs behind him. “It’s called a thigh master. I’ve got it upstairs in Bill’s old room; you’ve got to see it to believe it. Care to join us?”

“In a bit, perhaps,” Tonks says, shooting Harry an apologetic look and bumping into the kitchen table as she steps backwards. “I’d like to wish Ginny a happy birthday first.”

The garden is full of people, talking in groups beneath a cascade of silver streamers suspended in the air above them, stretching the length of the garden as if draped from invisible boughs. At the back of the garden a white canopy has been erected, with tables and chairs beneath it. Tonks comes down the back steps and makes her way through the crowd of witches and wizards, intending to greet Molly, who is talking animatedly to Mafalda Hopkirk. But before she can reach her, she senses—like a wave of heat from an opened oven, like the scent of a flower held under her nose—a tendril of Ginny-magic, wafting toward her through the eddies of guests. It’s because they fucked that Tonks can sense it; they fucked and didn’t finish and now their magic is mixed up and Tonks is feeling Ginny’s, a heat that flickers and jumps like a fire—warming, and not entirely safe.

Tonks stands on tiptoe, trying to see over the crowd, more than half of which is taller than she is.

A large wizard in white dress robes ambles toward the drinks table, and in the wake of the parted group behind him, Tonks sees Ginny, deep in conversation with an elderly witch in lilac heels.

Ginny’s flame-colored hair is done up in an elegant twist that has Fleur’s assistance written all over it. She’s wearing a black halter dress that leaves her shoulders bare, and Tonks can almost hear the argument that must have occurred between Ginny and her mother to reach this compromise. Something feminine yet not revealing, Molly would have insisted; and the dress does indeed meet those criteria—its neckline modest, its fabric loose around the hips. Something sexy but not fussed, Ginny would have wanted, and the dress is that too—untie the fabric knot at the nape of her neck, and the damn thing would slither right off her.

Ginny turns away from Tonks then, putting her head near the elderly witch’s and pointing at something on the other side of the garden. At the sight of Ginny’s naked back—her freckled scapulae, her deltoids flexing as she raises her other hand to shield her eyes from the sun—Tonks experiences a shiver of desire so powerful she almost feels sick. That black dress on Ginny is—it’s irrelevant, is what it is, because looking at Ginny in that dress is like looking at a clothed gazelle: the garment is of no importance whatsoever to the purpose and grace and power of the body inside it. An athlete’s body. That’s how Ginny wears that dress.

 _Look at me,_ Tonks thinks. 

And Ginny does. She glances up from the old witch, her eyes finding Tonks’s as surely as if Tonks had called her name. Tonks widens her stance, to be sure she doesn’t fall over.

Their eyes lock a moment. Then Ginny looks away.

Tonks watches as Ginny takes her companion by the arm and points towards the drinks table, where George is bartending. Steering the witch by the elbow, Ginny gives her an encouraging little nudge—something too polite to be a shove, but that does the work of one. The witch totters off toward George. Without looking at Tonks again, Ginny slips past a knot of guests and disappears around the corner of the house.

It’s now or never.

The pull of Ginny’s magic threads Tonks through the crowd like a needle.

It’s now.

“Nice to see you again, Professor Sprout.” Tonks nods and waves as she passes. “Wotcher, Neville. All right, Damien? Oh, hello, Molly. Yes, of course Teddy’s here, he and Remus are inside getting cleaned up. I thought I’d just give my best wishes to the birthday girl, and then I’ll—I’ll be right back.”

She passes two witches from the Ministry—“Hello, Bletchley; wotcher, Lil”—and finally reaches the east wall of the Burrow. Rounds it. 

And there is Ginny, leaning against the worn clapboards, tugging at the zipper of a small purple evening bag. Tonks trips over something or nothing and Ginny looks up at her, Tonks coming toward her in her silver hair and her unzipped dragonhide, her magic radiant around her, and Ginny jumps in surprise, dropping her bag in the grass.

 _Two kinds of people,_ Tonks thinks. Those who hold on tighter when they’re frightened, and those who drop everything and run. Good to know which kind you’re dealing with.

Aloud she says, “I startled you.”

Ginny ignores this, stooping to pick up her clutch. But as she’s bending down, Tonks feels Ginny’s magic reach for her, licking up her legs and heating the tips of her fingers. Ginny isn’t going to bolt this time.

“Having fun?” Ginny asks.

Tonks ignores that. She leans against the side of the house, feeling the cool of the shaded clapboards seep through the thin leather of her jacket, the board edges sharp against her back. She thinks of how she looked the last time Ginny saw her, in a ratty tee shirt with baby spit-up on the collar, mouse-colored hair she hadn’t bothered to cut, dark circles under her eyes.

“What were you pointing at earlier,” Tonks says conversationally, “when you were talking to that witch?”

“What?”

Ginny seems flustered by the non sequitur. Ginny seems nervous. Tonks admits to herself that she finds this attractive, the _zing_ in her cunt confirming.

“What witch?” Ginny asks.

“White hair, lilac heels. The one you got rid of so you could get yourself over here and have a moment with me.”

“I—” Ginny appears to be on the verge of denying this, then seems to think better of it. “That was Imelda Farnsworth,” she says. “Wife of some retired Ministry worker Dad’s friendly with. She heard Harry was here and wanted to see him for herself. I was telling her where she should look.”

“But Harry’s not in the garden. I just saw him in the house with your dad.”

“I know that,” Ginny says, with just a hint of impatience. She looks up at Tonks then, raising one eyebrow. “I didn’t say I was telling her where Harry _was._ ”

“Ah. I’m sure Harry appreciated that.”

From around the back of the house a shout of laughter is followed by a brief burst of what sounds like piccolo music. Tonks had better get things sorted with Ginny before they’re interrupted again. 

“So,” she says. “About last week.”

“I’m sorry I was such a prat,” Ginny blurts. “It freaked me out, when—when we got caught.”

“I’m sorry about that. And so is Remus. We—he and I—after you left, we—we talked about things.”

That’s one way of putting it, anyway.

“And?” Ginny looks hard at Tonks now, her eyes and mouth and jaw steeled into an expression that reminds Tonks of how Ginny looks when she’s playing Quidditch. She’s got her game face on.

“And Remus and I have got ourselves sorted. Which means, among other things, that if you’d ever like to continue what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted, it could be arranged.”

Ginny’s magic surges toward Tonks, all flame and flicker. Ginny tries to conceal it by fumbling with the zipper of her evening bag again. This time she gets it open, extracting a cheap cigarette case.

Tonks reaches out and arrests Ginny’s hand.

“Don’t smoke now,” she says.

“Why not?”

Tonks feels herself grin, slow and sure and turned on.

“Because it will taste better after.”

 _After what,_ Ginny opens her mouth to ask, and then doesn’t, blushing so deeply that Tonks knows she’s made herself perfectly clear.

Ginny wants to. Tonks can feel it as surely as she can feel her own morphing. She makes her hair ripple bright red for a moment, then flashes it back to silver again.

Face still pink, Ginny reaches up and runs a hand through Tonks’s hair, as if trying to catch the redness before it fades. Her fingernails make a shiver on Tonks’s scalp that travels through every cell of her and leaves her feeling lit up, Lumosed from the inside.

Ginny leans close to her ear. “Meet me in my room in five minutes,” she says, breath hot on Tonks’s cheek. “Third floor, first door on the left.”

And then she’s off, quick as a seeker, the black fabric of the skirt billowing behind her as she slips back among the guests.

It only takes Tonks three minutes. First to find Remus—tall as he is, he’s easily spotted—and whisper what she’s up to and kiss Teddy, and then to climb the narrow stairs to the third floor. But when she pushes open the door of Ginny’s bedroom, Ginny’s already there, perched on the edge of the writing desk beneath the window. Barefoot, her sandals abandoned on the rag rug in the center of the floor.

“Happy eighteenth birthday,” Tonks says from the doorway.

Ginny opens her mouth, closes it again. Looks at Tonks lounging against the door frame.

“Got a present for me?” she asks.

Tonks crosses the floor to the desk and stands between Ginny’s parted legs. Gripping the edge of the desk, Ginny leans forward, her mouth opening. Tonks slides her palm around Ginny’s bare back and draws her close and kisses her. 

The flame of Ginny’s tongue, so hot and sweet in Tonks’s mouth. Desire thickening inside her until she feels clogged with it, her throat swollen with the need to moan, the lips of her cunt slipping full of arousal as she pulls Ginny to her. The sharp ridges of Ginny’s spine under her hand, Ginny wrapping her legs around Tonks’s hips while her fingers slide inside the collar of Tonks’s shirt to flick the buttons open. 

Tonks draws back to help her with it and catches a flash of gold at Ginny’s wrist.

A gold watch. A coming-of-age watch. For seventeen.

Tonks clasps Ginny’s wrist and draws her arm up level with their faces.

“Your birthday present?” she asks.

Ginny mouths a line of kisses along Tonks’s jaw. “Mum and Dad gave it to me at breakfast.” 

“That would mean you’ve just turned seventeen.”

“Mmmm. Less talking, please.”

Tonks pulls back hard.

“You lied to me, then.”

Ginny sits back on the desk, looking genuinely startled.

“About what?” she asks.

“I stood in that doorway not five minutes ago and said ‘Happy eighteenth birthday’ and you didn’t correct me!”

“I didn’t know you thought that until just then. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! And last week when you were over, you said you were seventeen.”

“I was about to be seventeen! One week doesn’t make any difference, Tonks, come on.”

“It makes a difference that you lied to me! And I never—Oi, Ginny, I’m twenty-five. It’s bad enough I—”

“Don’t you _dare_ hand me that.” Ginny pushes herself off the desk and stands in front of Tonks, eyes blazing. “Don’t you fucking dare pull some ‘I’m too old for you’ shite. I’m _at least_ eighteen, in _here_ ”— Ginny touches her chest—“if not twenty-five. If not forty.”

“You can say what you like—” Tonks begins.

I’m not saying it because I like it, I’m saying it because it’s true!”

“It’s not true! I was fucking a sixteen-year-old last week! Merlin, you’re as bad a liar as Remus.”

“Well, maybe that’s because Remus and I have something in common.”

“And what’s that?”

“We’ve both had to live with—with our minds taken by dark magic.”

“Being a werewolf is not dark magic—” Tonks begins, but then her mind catches up to what Ginny’s saying and she falls silent. She’s never heard Ginny refer to what happened when she was eleven, not even obliquely. 

She forces herself to take a deep breath, to speak as calmly as she can. “Tell me what that has to do with this,” she says.

“Tom was... I was...when You-Know-Who was controlling me,” Ginny stammers. “He was making me be someone else. But if you can decide for yourself what’s true...what’s true about yourself, you get your power back. And I bet Remus would say the exact same thing.”

“Ginny. You already _are_ a powerful person. Merlin, look at you. Look at what you’ve accomplished. But you can’t just change objective facts. Suppose Remus suddenly decided he wasn’t a werewolf? Guess what—he’d still be one, and he’d be far more dangerous that way.”

“But he doesn’t go around announcing he’s a werewolf, does he, because if he did, people wouldn’t see him for who he is! That’s the same thing as this is, Tonks. If I’d told you I was sixteen, we’d never have done anything. If I have to lie so that people will see me more accurately, it’s not lying.”

“It fucking is! And if you’re lying to someone who cares about you, you’re just having it off at their expense. Which feels pretty shitty, if you want to know.”

“It’s not at your expense, Tonks.” Ginny gives a groan of frustration. “It would have been to your fucking _benefit_ , if you take my meaning. But if you really think I’m just too bloody young for you, fine, go away. But before you walk out that door, just tell me, if you don’t mind, exactly what it is you think I’m too young for. You think I’m too young to know whether I want to fuck? Because that’s the least of it—I’ve been doing it with girls since I was fourteen. Do you think I was too young to have lived through the nightmare that was Hogwarts last year? D’you think I was too young to have made the decision to stay there, in a fucking prison camp, because if I’d left, I’d be leaving everyone else behind, all those little kids, to fend for themselves against the bloody Carrows? Do you think I was too young to have had my mind raped by You-Know-Who when I was eleven? Because I never saw you or anyone else stepping in to protect me from any of that.”

“Oh, Ginny.” Tonks reaches out a hand to touch her, but the anger emanating from Ginny is like a wall vibrating between them; Tonks’s hand falls uselessly back at her side. “Ginny,” she repeats. “I’m sorry.”

Ginny faces her. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be me?” she asks. “Do you have the faintest clue what it was like growing up the youngest Weasley and the only girl? Even without all the diary stuff, do you have any idea how many things I wanted to do and be that were always, _always_ being taken away from me?” The hardness in Ginny’s face gives way then, and suddenly she looks close to tears. “If I didn’t tell myself things that were lies, I never could have made them come true. I never would have survived last year. I’d never have learned how to fly at all, much less have got scouted.”

Tonks sits down on the edge of the unmade bed.

“Okay,” she says. “I get it. I do.”

A few tears spill down Ginny’s cheeks, leaving soot streaks of mascara in their wake. Tonks pulls a handkerchief from her trousers and offers it to Ginny.

Ginny takes it and promptly blows her nose; despite everything, Tonks laughs.

“Well, that’s yours, now,” she says. “Though one of Remus’s old hankies isn’t quite the birthday present I’d intended to give you. Here, pass it over—let me fix your eyes.”

She dabs a corner of the hanky beneath Ginny’s lower lashes, wiping off the smeared mascara and blotting at her cheeks. But then a few more tears leak out, making two new rivulets of black.

Then Ginny laughs as well.

“More where that came from,” she says, wiping her eyes with her hand and smearing her eye makeup further. And then, sniffling, “Tonks. Kiss it away.”

Tonks does. Her hand on the back of Ginny’s head, she presses her lips carefully to each streak of tears, tasting the tiny drops of salt on the tip of her tongue. She dabs her tongue against the inside corner of each of Ginny’s closed eyes, feeling the tiny slit of each tear duct, the smooth edge of her eyelid, the tiny hairs of her inner eyelashes. Then Ginny’s mouth is hot on Tonks’s jaw as Tonks leans over her. A slow wet line of fire searing her pulse into a pounding that flows straight from her throat to her clit.

Ginny’s slides her hands inside Tonks’s jacket, palming her ribs and pushing her backwards on the bed. Tonks bangs her head against the headboard, but not hard, as Ginny throws one leg across her in a straddle, dropping down on her freckled elbows and bringing her face so close to Tonks’s that their noses touch.

“Our score so far,” she murmurs, her breath warm against Tonks’s mouth, “is two arguments and zero orgasms. That’s pretty terrible, wouldn’t you say?”

“I can fix that,” Tonks whispers, just before their lips meet in a kiss. And then, her mouth full of Ginny’s lower lip, “This is the rematch.”

She reaches up to cup those bare freckled shoulders at last, moving her fingers to the nape of Ginny’s neck where the halter dress is knotted. Tonks’s fingers are tingling like mad, but she gets the knot undone, and then the top of that dress is pooling around Ginny’s middle, and her small bare breasts are there, those fat nipples erect and dark and ready for Tonks’s mouth. Tonks shifts her hips, pushes herself up against the headboard and then rocks forward so that their positions are reversed and Ginny’s on her back on the bed with Tonks kneeling over her.

Watching Ginny, Tonks drags the hem of the dress slowly up over Ginny’s thighs.

And look at that—no knickers. Just a thatch of dark red, and the dark brown lips beneath, so full and flushed they look swollen.

“Godric, Ginny.” Tonks feels a little dizzy. “You’re gorgeous.”

“I left my knickers off for you,” Ginny says huskily.

“You were thinking about me?” Tonks traces a trail through the freckles on Ginny’s thigh.

“Yes, I was thinking about you.” Ginny rolls her eyes at the ceiling, the sound in her throat half arousal, half exasperation. “Bloody hell, Tonks. I only thought about you every fucking night this week.”

“Tell me what you were thinking,” Tonks murmurs. Her fingers traveling from Ginny’s muscled thigh to her hipbone, to the soft swell of her belly. 

“I— _fuck_ , touch me already.”

“Tell me first.” Tonks floats her fingers down Ginny’s abdomen and through the dark red triangle of hair. She lets the tips of her fingers just skim the closed purse of Ginny’s cunt.

A little moan escapes Ginny.

“Tell me,” Tonks says again. 

Ginny’s thighs flex, her hips tipping up toward Tonks’s hovering hand. “I was—I wanked every night this week to remembering us on the couch at your flat. I’ve come half a dozen times thinking about how it felt when you put your finger inside me. All right? Now come on and fuck me for real.”

 _Merlin_. A shiver of anticipation racks through Tonks, making her sit back a bit, pressing a hand to herself through her trousers. She can smell Ginny’s arousal, carnations and sea air and chive grass.

“Like this?” Tonks murmurs, moving one finger down the side of Ginny’s outer lips.

“ _Not_ like that, you cocktease. Like this.” Ginny moves to touch herself, but Tonks catches her wrist, and then her other wrist, and holds Ginny’s hands against the bed.

“Cocktease?” Tonks repeats, grinning. “I don’t see a cock anywhere.”

And maybe she shouldn’t have said that, because suddenly there is a morph-shimmer inside her; her bloke body, hidden inside her female body but pushing forward, wanting to come out, to be known.

She tries to quiet it again. She closes her eyes, feeling for her breasts, her cunt, her hips. She wants those parts now, wants them to stay—for now, at least—while she’s with Ginny. She wants her silver hair and the electric spark between her legs. She wants to fuck Ginny with these small hands. She wants to feel her heavy breasts against Ginny’s small ones. She wants come with her cunt.

Her female body evens out again, holds.

“Touch me, you, you—oh, _fuck_ you,” Ginny growls, straining to break free of Tonks’s hands, still pinning her to the bed.

“I think I’m fucking _you_ , actually,” Tonks says, and the surge of wetness inside her rides her right back into her female body, all the way.

“You’re fucking not. You’re fucking teasing me, is what you’re doing.”

“If I let go your hands will you do what I say?”

“If you’ll fucking touch me already.” 

Tonks lets go.

“Tweak your nipples,” she says.

Ginny does it, biting her lip and breathing high in her chest.

“You have a dirty mouth, Miss Weasley,” Tonks croons. “Fucking this and fucking that. You like saying fuck?”

Ginny’s eyes turn hard, eyebrows knitting.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she grits out.

Each word another zing.

“I like the way you take your lower lip between your teeth when you say it, _Ginevra_. It makes me feel like fucking you.”

“Fucking do it, then.”

“You want me to fuck your sweet little pussy?”

Ginny cries out, that low sweet sound Tonks remembers from last week, and Tonks a pulse of wetness between her legs in response, and Merlin, she has far too many clothes on. 

“Disvesteum,” she whispers, and all her clothes dissolve, reforming Merlin knows where, and who cares. Ginny looks up at her, brown eyes dark with hunger, and lets go of her own nipple to reach forward and take hold of Tonks’s. Tonks feels the soft tip of her breast roughen hard between Ginny’s fingers. Ginny squeezes, and inside Tonks everything flares. Ginny’s eyes burn into hers.

“I’ll fuck you now, sweetheart,” Tonks murmurs, and brings both her hands between Ginny’s legs and strokes her thumbs along the folded origami of her cunt. She fingers the full lips there, taking them between her thumb and forefinger. Gently, she begins to unfold them. 

Ginny opening. Exposed and leaking. Dark and wet. 

Slowly, holding Ginny open, she slides the tip of her middle finger in. Ginny cries out, all breath and need. The sound swells electric in Tonks—between her legs, straight up her spine, across her scalp. Ginny is panting now, a light sheen of sweat gracing her upper lip, her forehead. Watching her, Tonks presses in further, her finger sliding in the last knuckle in the tight-hot slick of Ginny. She curls her finger inside Ginny, then straightens it, pulling out again. Another cry slips from Ginny’s mouth and she bucks her hips, wanting that finger back. Tonks gives her two, and strokes more moans from her body like songs. 

Ginny grips Tonks by the shoulders, holding on. Tonks fucks her slow and steady, watching her freckled face break apart in the torture of this pleasure, her teeth in her lip and her eyes locked on Tonks, her eyes full of everything.

“Touch yourself now,” Tonks commands. “While I watch you and fuck you. Touch yourself and show me how you make yourself come.”

Ginny moans again, raw and hungry, and does as Tonks says. She brings one hand down and begins rubbing her clit, light and fast.

Tonks watches, moving her fingers in the soft heat inside. Ginny rubs off and whimpers, her eyes fixed on Tonks’s face as if she’ll never leave it, her mouth slack and full of little broken sounds, her cunt streaming as Tonks works her hand.

“You—” Ginny gasps. “Would you—would you—”

Tonks slows. “Tell me.”

Ginny blushes, her whole body hot and hard as a fever.

“Tonks—I’m close—want you to—would you—with your mouth—”

Godric, yes. Tonks would. 

Ginny moves her hand away from herself and clutches at the back of Tonks’s head as Tonks bends low, her breasts resting on the tops of her knees. She draws her wet fingers out of Ginny and, holding her thighs, tongues her instead, circling the swell of those pussy lips with her mouth. Wet salt sheen mild _slick_. Oh Merlin, she would. She teases the folds of Ginny’s clit hood back, and then the tip of her tongue flicks just _there_. A high whimper breaks from Ginny, a plea made of nothing but sound.

Tonks holds Ginny’s legs open and flicks her tongue against her, fast and light like Ginny rubbed herself. Ginny grips Tonks by the hair and moans, and the sound of it slides into Tonks like the tip of a finger; Ginny’s cry _opens_ her. 

She grips Ginny’s thighs, tasting, teasing. Ginny’s leg muscles flex beneath her hands, tensing for release. With each flick of her tongue Tonks tastes Ginny’s pleasure and need, tastes the bud of her clit, precious in her mouth. 

Ginny lets out a staccato burst of syllables, high and fast. Her heels press against Tonks’s back, and then, between her sounds, words come. 

“Please—oh, please, more—Tonks—please—fuck me again—” 

So sweet to hear her beg. Tonks eases back inside Ginny, her own pleasure wild inside her, fingers stroking into that tight, wet heat. And it’s so, so sweet to have her mouth on Ginny, and her fingers inside Ginny, when Ginny’s whole body tenses and she comes. 

With her head whipping sideways on the pillow, her heels digging hard into Tonks’s shoulder blades, hauling her in. With a cry that keeps going as Tonks flicks at her clit, making Ginny writhe and cry and cry again. Like a wild bird, the song of her body trembling. 

At last Ginny quiets and goes limp on the bed, her heels easing their pressure. Then she laughs, endorphin-drunk. Tonks rises to her knees and slides all her naked skin up Ginny’s body, her whole self sliding against Ginny’s flushed-pink freckled skin. And oh yes, she wants to come just like this, with Ginny blown out beneath her. She grinds lightly against the rise of Ginny’s mons, against the rough of Ginny’s thatch of hair. Just like this, with Ginny so deliciously fucked into oblivion beneath her. Because of what Tonks can do with her body again. She raises herself up on her elbows and looks down into Ginny’s dark, dilated eyes.

“You,” Ginny says slowly, as if pronouncing a word in a foreign language.

“Gonna come against you, Ginny. All right?”

Ginny grins, loose and stoned-looking.

“Gonna rub off on your sweet little pussy.”

Ginny cants her hips, bucking up as Tonks rocks into her, and the catch on her clit is perfect. Ginny’s coarse hair perfect against her own, Ginny’s warmth radiating up through Tonks’s wetness. Ginny slides her hands between their bodies and finds Tonks’s nipples and pinches. And fuck, _yes_ to that triangle of pleasure, making the tips of her tits and the stem of her clit snap like a flag in the wind. Snapping Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. 

Tonks is calling her name, _Ginny_ , and Ginny’s right there.

When she comes it’s like a plunge into a lake—the depth, the way it takes her completely. She’s underwater, her body held everywhere. And _Ginny_ , the word surfacing again in a gasp. All pleasure, dripping and trembling against Ginny’s skin. Ginny’s mouth, Ginny’s hair. Ginny kissing her, Ginny laughing in her ear. Ginny, whose elegant French twist is all undone. On the pillow beside her head, a crushed gardenia and three hairpins.

“Happy birthday,” Tonks whispers, rolling off Ginny to lie beside her. “You can smoke now,” she adds with a grin.

Ginny leans toward her and kisses her again.

“Holy Christ, Tonks. That was—that was wow.” Ginny offers a lopsided smile, reaching out to run her fingers through Tonks’s hair. “I like the silver,” she murmurs. “The minute I saw you, I wanted to put my hands in it. And to rip your clothes right off you.”

“Where are my clothes, now that you mention it?”

Ginny points across the room with her toe. “There. Quite neatly done.”

Tonks raises herself up on one elbow. Her clothes are hanging from a wooden clothes hanger on the doorknob, the button-down shirt inside the dragonhide jacket, and the trousers draped over the dowel. She blinks at it.

“Blimey,” she says. “I only Vanished them.”

“Permanent folding charm,” Ginny tells her. “Mum cast them on all our rooms years ago. I’m surprised more people don’t know the spell.”

Ginny sits up too then, Summoning her evening bag and taking out her wand and cigarette case. She pulls out a cigarette, lighting it with the Lumosed tip as she inhales.

The smell of the smoke sends a thrill of pain through Tonks. A sharp twist of —what is it? Something unfinished, something lost. Something she meant to do and forgot. Watching Ginny smoke, she wonders once again what she’s forgotten of the battle, and why she’s had to forget it, what she failed to do that day.

_It’s just a bloody cigarette._

Tonks forces herself to hold still, breathe. But that smell in her nose. Sharp, like—what is it like? Like burning carnations. No, like—

Cloves. 

That’s what it is.

“Sirius smoked those,” she says aloud.

The smoke smells of Sirius. As if he’s here. In the smoke. So exactly that it hurts her heart. As if he’s come back to them.

“Who do you think taught me to smoke ‘em?” Ginny asks.

“Sirius...taught you?”

“That Christmas at Grimmauld Place, when Dad was in St. Mungo’s.”

“Sirius did,” Tonks says faintly.

“I was always getting sent out of the room, remember? For being too young, being a girl. Fragile little Ginny. I spent a lot of time hanging around with Buckbeak, and Sirius would be there too sometimes, and of course he’d be smoking and drinking, and when I asked if I could have a cigarette, he said yes. And you know, he showed me. He got it, I think. Why I wanted to. Tonks, are you okay?”

Tonks closes her eyes, and the tears on the rims of her eyelids are forced over, spilling down her cheeks.

“I am okay,” she says truthfully. “It’s just—I don’t know. Maybe there’s more mourning to be done now, yeah? Now that the war’s over.” She sniffles, tears falling on her thighs. “Sirius doesn’t even have a headstone, Ginny. And he should, and a proper funeral. We need to. It would be important for Remus, too, if we did that. I’m sorry—” Tonks wipes her nose on the back of her hand, the handkerchief lost somewhere in the bedclothes. “This isn’t very festive talk.”

“It’s okay,” Ginny says. “I think Sirius would like a headstone. Maybe that would be a way for him to rest, to break the house’s hold on him.”

“What do you mean, ‘the house’s hold on him’?”

“I mean just that.” Ginny looks puzzled.

A cold finger of panic touches Tonks at her throat, slides down her chest.

“Explain what you’re talking about,” she says.

“The spell the house was doing. To keep him there? You know, the reason he wouldn’t go out. Because the house wouldn’t let him.”

Oh, Merlin. Oh, no. 

“Ginny, who told you that?”

“Nobody told me; it was obvious. I mean...wasn’t it?” Beneath her freckles, Ginny has gone pale. “It was obvious to me. I mean, I could feel it, just the same as when you walk in a room and you can feel if the temperature’s hot or cold.”

Tonks shakes her head, mute.

“I thought everyone knew.” Ginny drags hard on her cigarette, fingers twitching. “Fuck, I should have said somethi—no, damn it.” She slaps the bed angrily, scattering ash. “I _did_ say something. I tried to talk to Sirius about it once, and he told me it was none of my business. It seemed like _he_ knew what was going on, at least somewhat—but he just couldn’t be arsed to hear what I had to say.” Ginny’s eyes fill with tears. “And that’s _always_ the way it was, Tonks, with everybody. You know? Nobody ever wanted my opinion about anything. I’d try to say things, and...and nobody listened.”

Ginny’s really crying now. Not only about Sirius. About the diary. About her family. About all of it.

Tonks pulls Ginny to her chest in a hug, her own tears running down her face and falling on the top of Ginny’s head.

“I’m sorry, Ginny,” she sniffles. “I promise I won’t make that mistake with you again.”

Ginny sighs against Tonks, letting herself be caressed for a minute. But then she sits up again, tipping the long cigarette ash onto an empty saucer on the desk. She smokes in silence, and Tonks breathes in Sirius each time Ginny exhales.

“Do you reckon anything would have been different for him if the Order _had_ known about the house?” Ginny asks after a while.

Tonks tries to think. If they’d known about the curse, certainly they could have found a way to break it. Sirius himself was strong enough to break it when he thought Harry’s life was in danger. But would anything have been different for him in the end, even if the others had understood why he was trapped there? Sirius was so hurt, and so vulnerable—though Tonks would never have thought to use that word about him when he was alive—that even if he had been able to leave the house, how well would he have managed, unsteady and spooked as he was? Would he have got himself killed just the same? Sooner, perhaps? 

“I think Padfoot would have been happier,” she says at last. “Padfoot would have liked to go outside, and feel the wind, and run.”

Ginny takes a final drag of her cigarette.

“Well, that’s one more thing I wish I’d managed to tell someone about, then,” she says, reaching down to stub out the butt in the teacup. “Are you going to tell Remus?”

 _I can’t,_ Tonks thinks. But even as the words form in her mind, she knows they’re more reflex than counsel.

“I think I have to,” she says aloud. “We sort of promised not to lie to each other anymore.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Ginny says, wiping her tear-stained face. “About my age and stuff.”

“I get why you did,” Tonks says. “But Ginny—you don’t have to any more, okay? Not with me.”

As she says this, she feels inside herself the shimmer that is her other body, not wanting to be left out. Wanting seen, wanting known.

All right, then.

Tonks removes her arm from around Ginny’s shoulder and scoots away a few inches on the bed. Ginny looks at her curiously.

“What you said before,” Tonks begins, crossing her arms over her breasts. “About how you have to lie so people will see you accurately. It’s—it’s the opposite for me. I have to tell the truth, and I haven’t quite done that with you yet.”

“How do you mean?”

And then it’s time. For the first time since she got pregnant. The first time in a year. Before she can talk herself out of it.

 _Come out_ , she thinks, her whole body tingling. 

And then she’s her bloke self again.

Instinctively, she covers her cock with her hands. Ginny hasn’t ever even met Tonks in this body, and now it’s sitting here beside her completely starkers.

Ginny’s eyes open a bit wider but she does not flinch or move away. Then, tentatively, she reaches out and touches Tonks’s forearm, just below the elbow. Runs her fingers through the dusting of dark hair there. Very slowly, the way you’d caress a shy cat or dog.

“This is me too,” Tonks says, her eyes on the floor. She didn’t anticipate how naked and frightened it would make her feel to be like this in front of Ginny.

“Hello, there,” Ginny says. “Do you...do you still have the same name when...when you’re a man?”

Tonks nods.

Ginny runs her fingers across Tonks’s forearm again, a bit more firmly now.

“Ginny—is this okay with you?”

“How do you mean?” Ginny asks.

“I want to be both, both bodies, and I know you said—when you were at our flat, you said—I got the impression that you might be done with blokes.”

“I did say something like that.” Ginny licks her lips, thinking. “And—and I do think I might be done with blokes in general. But this is a bit different, isn’t it? I mean, it’s still you in there.” 

“Yes,” says Tonks, and the relief she knows is showing on her face is just the tip of a feeling that begins somewhere deep in her body and spreads everywhere. To her heart, her bollocks, her toes. “It’s still me,” she repeats. 

Ginny runs her fingers through Tonks’s bloke hair, much longer than the short silver she has as a woman.

“I like it that your hair looks just like Teddy’s,” Ginny says.

Tonks reaches up and pulls a lock of it forward. And bloody hell, it’s the exact same shade of turquoise as Teddy’s is. And that’s—interesting.

She’ll look a bit less like Sirius when she’s a bloke, then, which is probably best for everyone. But before Tonks can think more about that, there’s a flutter of wings at the open window above the desk. The Weasleys’ exhausted-looking owl hops in, a slip of folded parchment in its beak.

Ginny jumps.

“Errol? What’ve you got there?”

The owl drops the parchment on the desk and flaps across the room to Ginny’s dresser, where it promptly tucks its head under its wing.

“It’s from George,” Ginny says, unfolding the note. She sits back down on the bed so Tonks can read it too.

_Gin, Mum’s doing her nut. She knows you’ve gone missing (but not why—YET) and she wants to do the cake and we are OUT of diversionary tactics. Remus has already deployed cute Teddy weapon and helpless dad with nappy weapon, Hermione did a long bit with ideas for helping war orphans, Charlie let loose his baby Horntail which drank all the Ogden’s, and I set fire to the tent. You’re welcome, but now we are OUT OF AMMO so get your arse down here now. As in NOW._

_Forge_

_PS: NOW. Ron and Harry don’t know yet but we might have to tell them_

“All right,” Tonks says, torn between laughing at the note’s contents and wanting to cry at its signature. “We’d better dress. I’m going to morph back now.”

“Could I give you— _this_ you—a kiss before you do?”

“Of course.”

Ginny puts her hands on Tonks’s bloke shoulders and delivers a kiss on the cheek, her mouth small and tentative against the unfamiliar maleness of Tonks’s jaw and scent and skin. Tonks sits still, letting Ginny take her time. Ginny caresses Tonks’s face, her fingers smooth on what feels to be a good close shave. Then she kisses Tonks on the cheek again, her mouth lingering a bit longer this time.

Tonks’s cock begins to stir. The feeling of Ginny kissing her bloke body is just as good as when Ginny kisses her female form, and she wants very much to turn her head and kiss Ginny back. Which would definitely start things up all over again. Summoning all her restraint, Tonks scoots away on the bed and morphs back to female. Then she jumps up and reaches for her trousers.

Ginny’s elegant chignon is done for; Tonks combs her fingers through the loose red tresses, tucking Ginny’s hair behind her ears. Ginny straightens Tonks’s shirt collar and smooths the silver hair into something that looks a bit less like they’ve just had a roll in the hay. Then they put on their shoes and hurry down.

Stepping through the kitchen door to the back porch, Tonks pauses, gazing out over the crowd in the garden. Kingsley and Arthur are standing just at the foot of the porch steps, chatting. Harry and Ron and Hermione are over by the shed, Harry half-hidden behind his friends. Bill and Fleur are at the drinks table, where George is cradling Victoire in his arms. And Remus is standing by the edge of the tent canopy talking to Charlie, with Teddy strapped face-out against his chest. Charlie has unbuttoned his shirt and appears to be showing Teddy his dragon tattoos.

“Ginny Weasley, where on earth have you been?”

Molly has appeared below them on the grass, looking harried.

“I’m sorry, Mum.” Ginny grins, not even trying to turn her I-just-got-fucked-within-an-inch-of-my-life face into an expression that even faintly resembles ‘sorry.’

“Well, come along now,” Molly fusses. “Tonks, dear, thank you for finding her. Ginny, we’re going to do the cake in five. Where’s—oh, excuse me, Kingsley, I must borrow Arthur to help with this next bit.”

Kingsley gives a gracious wave of his hand.

“Go with your mum,” Tonks whispers to Ginny. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

Ginny nods and goes down the steps. Molly takes Ginny’s elbow, as if she might escape again, and the three Weasleys head off toward the canopy.

“Wotcher, Minister,” Tonks says, going down the porch steps until she’s eye level with Kingsley, which means she’s standing two steps from the grass.

“Auror Tonks.” Kingsley’s eyes twinkle even as his face remains serious. “It’s good to see you. We’ve missed you very much downtown.”

It is typical of Kingsley’s skill with people, Tonks thinks, that he’s managed to acknowledge the awkward fact of her suspension while at the same time conveying that he bears her no ill will because of what happened.

“I miss being downtown,” she says truthfully. “I’d be at work tomorrow if I could.” She grins, not wanting to depress the party atmosphere. “Well, I’d be there on Monday, anyway.”

“How much time have you got left before you’re allowed back?” Kingsley asks.

“Eight long weeks.”

“Have you heard,” Kingsley says slowly, “that the Muggle who was injured when—when your memory modification charm went awry—has made a full recovery?”

“I hadn’t heard. Merlin, I’m really relieved.” 

“How are you doing?” Kingsley asks suddenly, and Tonks understands the question as more than mere politeness.

“I’m good. Really good, in fact.” Even as she says it, she feels her magic stir inside her, aligning itself with the truth of her words. “Just this past week, I’ve—” she hesitates. What could she possibly say about the events of the past week to Kingsley, who is now not only her superior, but Minister for Magic? However friendly she and Kingsley were during Order days, there are some details one’s boss should not be privy to. “I’ve got some personal things sorted,” she finishes. “I’m rested now, and I’ve got my morphing skills back, and my magic is quite accurate again.”

“I expected nothing less,” Kingsley says kindly. “And I’m sure you know you aren’t the only highly skilled Auror who’s been suspended in the last few months for...errors. This last year’s been hard on everyone, obviously. If our numbers weren’t so depleted, I’d order mandatory paid time off, in rotation, for all of us. I could certainly use some.”

Tonks decides to risk voicing the thought that has been percolating within her ever since the night of the Veritaserum.

“Kingsley. I’m planning to appeal the remainder of my suspension. I’m ready to go back to work now.”

Kingsley looks at her a long time before answering, not searching her face exactly, but taking her in.

Tonks holds his gaze.

“I can tell you’re ready,” Kingsley says finally. “It’s quite—” He looks away a moment, deciding something. “Forgive me for being personal, Tonks, but I can sense your magic, and it’s very strong indeed.”

Tonks bites her lip to keep from laughing. _Yes, Minister, that would be at least partly due to all the fantastic sex I’ve been having._

And Merlin, Kingsley can probably sense that too, though he’s much too decorous to ever let on.

“I’ll start the process on Monday, then,” she says.

“Don’t.”

Is Kingsley joking? Tonks looks into his dark eyes and her heart falls when she sees that he isn’t.

“But why not? Kingsley, you just said yourself—”

“Because I can’t grant an appeal.” Kingsley wraps his hand around the handrail and gazes intently at the weathered wood. “When I took office, I made a vow not to do anything that could possibly be interpreted as cronyism. The entire Ministry is suffering from Fudge’s legacy there, which means all of wizarding Britain is suffering.” He looks up at her again, his face sober. “I’m sorry, Tonks. I know your suspension couldn’t have come at a worse time for...for your family, financially speaking.”

 _Damn_. She knows he’s right, but damn all the same. She really wanted her job back.

“However,” Kingsley continues, “to the financial point. There’s a team I’m putting together now.”

He pauses, fingering his gold earring. The gesture reminds Tonks of how young Kingsley is—just thirty-three, although his gravitas and his bald head and his height give the impression of a man a decade older. The youngest Minister in modern history, and from the looks of things so far, probably also one of the best.

“It’s a team composed entirely of Unspeakables,” Kingsley continues. “Liaison work with other races who were on Voldemort’s side.”

Tonks sighs, shaking her head.

“Remus won’t take it. It’s nice of you to mention it again, and of course he’d be ace at the job, but his feelings about that haven’t changed.”

Kingsley’s eyebrows creep up on his face.

“Actually, I wasn’t thinking of Remus,” he says.

“You—oh.” Tonks feels her neck prickle with embarrassment. “I’m sorry—when you said liaison to other races, I just assumed—”

“Quite understandable.” Kingsley’s mouth twitches. “I have my liaison team in place, however. But Tonks, I still need operatives to cover them. It’s Unspeakable work, you understand, not Auror. But I need an Auror’s skills.”

Kingsley lets his smile all the way out then, his magic unfurling and extending toward her as he does. And then the deep, slow, blue of his magic is rising all around her, as gentle and as powerful as the sea. 

Her own magic leaps in response, splashes back into his. She feels like laughing, diving; she could turn somersaults in Kingsley’s buoyant smile. 

“You’re recruiting me,” Tonks manages, grinning wildly.

Kingsley pulls his magic back most of the way.

“Officially,” he says, “the position does not exist. There will be no record of your employment, and therefore no conflict with your suspension. I don’t have to remind you that Unspeakables report only to me.”

“Would I be able to return to the Aurors after?”

“If all goes well, this assignment should last six weeks. I can make no promises on the time front, however.”

“I accept,” Tonks says, and for a moment their magic joins again, twining in a rush of warmth and pressure that feels like the magical equivalent of a handshake sealing a deal.

Then Kingsley really does offer his hand. Tonks takes it. 

“I’m glad to hear that being an Auror is still your highest priority,” he says. “I’m told that wizards motivated only by the glamour of an Unspeakable position rarely make good in it.”

“Thank you, Minister.”

Kingsley’s eyes twinkle again. “Let’s go back to being mates now, shall we?” he says. “This is a party, after all. I’ll Owl you the Apparition coordinates for Monday.”

Tonks gives him a gentle punch on the arm. “All right, mate. Let’s go and get George to pour us a couple of pints, and we’ll drink to it.”

Above their heads the air is filled with a tinkling sound, as if a skyful of miniature wind chimes had all caught a breeze. Tonks looks up and realizes that the silver streamers above them are in fact thousands of tiny silver bells, which have all begun ringing at once.

“That means it’s cake time,” Kingsley says. “If you’ll excuse me—I’ve been asked to say a few words.” 

He hurries off, and as soon as he does, Tonks hears Remus calling her name. He’s still standing with Charlie on the other side of the garden, waving his arm to get her attention. The sun catches his hair, turning those last brown streaks golden, and making all the grey shine.

“Tonks, come and join us,” he shouts over the continued tinkling of the bells and the noise of fifty conversations. “It’s cake!”

A very un-Remus-like thing to do, Tonks reflects, calling attention to himself like that. Shouting about pudding is something Sirius would have done. The awareness twinges inside her--memories of Sirius always will, probably. And yet, Remus yelling “Cake!” across the garden is a happy thing; that part of Sirius that is lives on inside him is a part of Sirius that was happy. And there _were_ happy parts, right up to the end.

The realization warms her even as it stings, like good firewhisky.

“I’m coming,” she calls back to Remus.

Hearing Tonks’s voice, Teddy turns his head toward her, squirming against his father’s chest. He waves his arms and legs and makes his crow-like _awwk_ of excitement, a cry that carries across the garden with impressive volume.

He’s probably trying to _be_ a crow, Tonks realizes as she starts toward them.

She might just have to learn to morph some feathers then, if she wants to get a good night’s sleep.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Rarepairs and femslash don't get nearly as much notice as the bigger ships, so your kudos, comments and recs would be extra appreciated here!


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